Anyway, as I was saying, or trying to. I think it’s good to write stuff down, even the dark stuff . Life is always up and downs, that’s natural. It’s just that some of us experience more severe ups and downs than others. I’m always a bit suspicious of people that are always mega cheerful all the time, I think how can anyone be that happy all the time. Or maybe I’m just jealous because I’m not. But I think it’s good to write, and talk with people on forums like this, particularly during the dark periods. When we go back some time later and see what we said it can almost be like it was another person who wrote/said that stuff. At least that’s how I’ve felt on occasion when I’ve looked back at some of the stuff I’ve said during really dark times. But it can be really useful in helping us to understand ourselves and our personality and mind-set. As anyone who suffers with MH issues will tell you it’s often impossible to control what goes through our mind at times, no matter how irrational it can sometimes seem to an objective observer. Nevertheless, there are definitely trigger points for all of us, events or things that can have a dramatic effect on how we feel or react. Being able to recognise what these are can be a really big help. I don’t know about you but I’ve always been really bad at self-analysis, it’s something that I have never been able to do, it was just a skill I didn’t have. A few years ago I started seeing a drugs counsellor who would set me regular exercises that involved quite rigorous self-analysis. I found it almost impossible. I would sit there with a blank look on my face, there were simply no cogs whirring around inside my head. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to engage in the process it was simply that I didn’t know how too. I found it so hard that in the end I stopped going to those sessions. I just could not engage on that level.
This is why writing your thoughts down and talking with other people can be a help, particularly during dark periods. When we go back and read what we wrote some time later we can definitely see thought patterns emerging that we may not have noticed at the time. In short for me it can help in engaging in that self-analysis that I would find very difficult to do if I consciously tried to do it. The key to learning is to not keep making the same mistakes over and over again. In my case I often couldn’t see that I was making the same mistakes many times over, I couldn’t see because I had little or no self-analytical skills. By writing stuff down and talking with other people and then looking back some time later I found that without being aware of it I was noticing things that I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed without that record of what I said. I was helping to develop my self-analytical skills without really being aware that I was doing it. This can really help in avoiding making the same mistakes time over. So I personally feel that there is a real benefit in writing stuff down. It may not always make sense at the time but looking back some time later when perhaps the intensity of the feelings have died down a bit we can begin to see what our thought patterns were at that time and why they were like that. So definitely keep writing, I think it can help.
|