There are quite a few people who've told me that they appreciate when I share about my experiences with bipolar disorder. Doing so has helped them better understand what it is to have a condition like this. I suppose it helps me too. Writing about it gives me that much more strength over something that really should have killed me years ago already. So here is another report from the wacky world of manic depression!
This morning I saw my counselor for the first time in several months. Getting as much substitute teaching in as I can has prevented me from adequately addressing my overall mental health as much as I really should have been doing. Controlling my bipolar disorder involves many things. Medication and counseling are two of those, and they work hand in hand. The meds restore a measure of control and the counseling helps me develop tools that the meds can't provide.
I went in today with especially fresh issues to confront: the depressive episode that's been dragging on since at least the holidays, that only in the past few weeks have I realized has been happening. Dovetailing with that is my inability to be able to write like I need to. Those were the two biggest things that I sought to address with my counselor.
What came about during that time was something I had been looking forward to returning to for some time now: I underwent a session of EMDR therapy. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a technique I had been treated with for two sessions before COVID hit. My counselor at the time and I tried another session over Zoom during the lockdown but that proved to be infeasible. Today was the first time in six years that I had the opportunity to undergo EMDR in the presence of a trained professional.
At the time, six years ago, I was being treated with EMDR in an effort to aggressively counter the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from abuse I received as a child many years earlier. Because of COVID bringing everything to a screeching halt my treatment of that was interrupted. But in the time that I had it I was able to find some ways to counter the PTSD. If you read my book Keeping the Tryst it will probably give you some insight into how I was able to overcome that particular monster. The abuse from my mother is something that no longer troubles me. I've come to a place at last where I'm not being constantly haunted by that any more. So that's good.
When I went at length this morning describing how I've lost my writing capacity, my counselor suggested we have an EMDR session. I readily accepted the offer. She has many of the tools that are used in the typical round of therapy. Today we used these hand-held buzzers that the counselor can adjust the rate and severity of buzzing. My job was to hold the buzzers and close my eyes and engage with the counselor in conversation. Sounds weird, but it does help to peel back the layers and bring definition to some things that evade ready description.
We did EMDR for the better part of half an hour. What was the result?
I think that it might have had some effect. None to immediately impact my writing ability, but it did help me narrow down my expectations of myself and put my abilities into focus. My counselor suggested that I'm in a place right now where I'm not compromising my ethics when it comes to what I choose to write and HOW to write. The issue of artificial intelligence came up, something that I am 100% sure is being used for a LOT of the writing that I'm seeing lately. I can't use that, I told her. It would violate my integrity as a writer. She said that it's good that I know what I can and can't do in that regard. And that probably sooner than later there would be a swing away from using AI in everything and that there will come new appreciation for those who do not embrace AI in their work. Hearing that made me feel much better.
I'm also visualizing my "writer's block" in a new way. Every time I've felt stopped from writing, I have literally envisioned a solid block of concrete or hard stone standing in the way of where I am and where I long to be. I keep hammering at the block with my fists and all that it achieves is that my hands become ragged and scraped and nothing has yielded. After this morning I'm seeing it differently. I'm now seeing it as a block of marble, the kind that Michelangelo had standing in his studio. And just as Michelangelo came to see David trapped in the marble waiting to be freed, so I now also can see my own block as something to work at freeing a sculpture from. I can stop hammering with my fists and try addressing it as an artist chiseling away at it with finer tools.
Like I said, there is going to be no immediately seeing the impact that today's session had. But I think it was a great step in the right direction. There was some very real movement, the kind that I needed to have happen. I prefer to believe that it's going to soon prove to have been time well spent with my counselor, that there is legitimate fruit that will be borne from it.
How well will it work? We'll come to find out, I imagine sooner than later.
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