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The Therapist in My Pocket

Guilt permeates my existence. It creeps into my dreams. Sometimes I feel guilty without knowing why and have to look for something to feel guilty about, invent something if necessary, to reassure myself that the intensity of my remorse has meaning.

Naturally my cat uses my guilt against me. By accident I stepped on her paw once.  An ear-splitting yowl followed. To say I was sorry, I pampered her with tuna treats. Now she routinely feigns being stepped on in order to procure apologies in snack form. If my foot barely grazes her toe, she will unleash an agonized wail that would make the Marquis de Sade weep with pity.

However, as bad as guilt is, embarrassment runs a close second.

Maybe that is because I am incapable of feeling mildly embarrassed. When I get embarrassed, all the humiliations of my entire life gather into a single point of gravity, and I want to crawl under the bed covers, face and all, with a teddy bear tucked under my chin, and stay there until the sun fizzles to a cinder.

A few weeks ago the horror unraveled: I made a mistake. It was a small mistake on the level of a typo. But I have bipolar disorder and, as mistakes often do, this one thumped my mood off a precipice and into freefall. I was falling for days. After too many mornings of waking up in misery and dreading the day, I decided that enough was enough.

I decided to try an experiment. I began a kind of self-therapy, invented by me, in which I tried to change the way I think by writing down praise and encouragement in the second person, as in “You did a smashing job with your story yesterday, simply smashing.” (Apparently my Therapist Self is British.)

I am no stranger to being my own psychiatrist. I used a similar form of therapy to get past being blocked as a writer. I keep a “therapy file” on my computer. I created it to tame the critical voices that chorused at me as I wrote. If I identified a mood-shattering thought such as “You are being self-indulgent” or “You will never finish this,” I would dash off to my therapy file and write out the offending thought; then I would unleash devastating rebuttals.

This therapy was cathartic. Our culture teaches its writers largely through shaming, and I had absorbed its messages well. As a result, I had to learn to lock my critical side in a cage for a while and be kind to myself in my thoughts as I wrote. I needed a buffer. Otherwise, I could not write at all.

I still have my “therapy file” but I no longer use it to argue with internal critics. They rarely plague me anymore, at least not when I am writing, Still, I always try to think of something to praise about my writing and write it in my therapy file at the end of each session. Sometimes I gush shamelessly – whatever is necessary to maintain my morale against any discouraging messages that intrude on my writing from trolls, say, or editors.

My experiment of replacing shaming with encouragement worked beautifully with my writing. Now writing almost always feels good and never bad. However, once I step away from my keyboard, many of the old self-doubts can surface, and I find myself confronting similar feelings in my life that I once struggled with in my writing.

When I made my recent embarrassing mistake, I realized I needed a “therapy File” or something similar, not just for my writing, but for my life. Stuffing a journal full of discouraging thoughts to argue with seemed impractical, so I began writing emails to myself instead. On the notepad of my phone I would point out and praise anything I did right, from cleaning out my closet to writing a good story, always addressing myself as “you.”

Why would I call myself “you”? While I am fond of the first person perspective, sometimes when I am struggling emotionally, writing about my problems in the first person intensifies my anxiety; I feel helpless – “I” alone against the world.

Addressing myself as “you” invites rational detachment. It switches me into the role of a counselor; I begin working on solving my problems rather than merely describing them. Best of all, calling myself “you” reminds me to be as nice to myself as I would be to a friend.

For almost two months, morning after morning, I have written my emails or “affirmations” without fail. During the day, I reread them, and they comfort me. Whenever my mood dips beneath the water line, I can grab onto an email from myself and feel better.

As my own therapist, I do more than dispense praise. The emails address any concerns I have. They help me see my problems from the outside. In them I talk to myself the way I would a friend, being as honest as possible while always remaining encouraging.

There is a bonus: I am less dependent on social media for good feelings. For many months I have been driven to check social media sites like Twitter and Facebook with a compulsion that borders on pathological. Now, Instead of scrolling down on my phone for social media notifications in search of a mood boost, I go to my self-sent emails and reread them. I have over 50 now, and even the earliest ones lift my mood.

The problem with looking to social media for happy feelings is that I never know what I will find – praise for a blog post, a greeting from a friend, a sour comment from a troll, an “unfollow,” or nothing at all. When I go to my emails to make myself feel better, I can be sure that I will be reading only things that are likely to make me feel better – not worse. When Twitter disappoints, my emails are there for me.

My “therapy” is not a cure for depression or bipolar disorder by any means, but my messages to myself on my notepad have given me some desperately needed power over my moods. They are changing habits of thinking that did not come from me but were imposed from without – habits that hurt and deplete me without giving anything in return.

When my mood is teetering at the precipice of a bottomless void, I can reach for my emails, read them, and feel better. The true test, of course, will be to see if they will work against my cat guilt. “Despite her theatrics, you did not actually step on her paw; therefore you do not owe her an apology or tuna treats. You are not an inveterate stomper of kitten toes. That is not who you are. You are a writer. You love kitties. Take a deep breath and go read a book.”


If you enjoyed this post you might like my other writing. Take a moment and sign up for my free starter library. Click here. Also my new novel \”Remembering the Future\” is available for purchase on Amazon.

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