Monthly Livestream Happening Now!!

Q1: 05.45…My Mom is in the hospital because she has a blood clot in both lungs. The doctor thinks it's because of the cancer in her uterus. Before Mom went in we thought that she was having anxiety attacks for about 2 weeks because she was going to have surgery to remove the cancer from her uterus on Wednesday. On Tuesday she had one that was going on for over an hour and was not getting any better so I called 911 and the paramedics said she had an irregular heart rate and had to go to the hospital. That when we found the blood clots and was told that If she had gone in for surgery she could have DIED!!! It turns out that the anxiety attacks were actually blood clots. There was a little voice in my head saying it was something more than anxiety but I ignored it thinking it was just because of the surgery. I feel so freaking guilty that I didn't get her help sooner and she was suffering for so long and could have DIED!! How do I move forward and stop blaming myself for all this? I know she is in the right place now and get the help she needs but my guilt will not go away. Q2: 11.20…I'm in this weird situation where I feel like I'm having to forgive my current boyfriend for the things he did in his past. Before he and I became a couple, he was in a relationship with a woman who basically treated him as if he was garbage. They had a commitment ceremony called a handfasting and they posted pics of this all over their social media pages for the last 3 years until they broke up. My boyfriend cheated on this woman several times with several different people while they were together, and it really disgusts me that he was with this woman, that he handfasted with her, that he had multiple affairs and that he was doing this while he was constantly singing her praises publicly. I have so many mixed feelings about all of this, but the two top feelings are of disgust and disappointment. He was lying about being soulmates with someone for years, and that disturbs me. I feel like he not only robbed us of having a beautiful hanfasting ceremony, but I firmly believe that despite how happy he is in our current relationnship that he's going to cheat on me. I feel like I'm somehow being a jerk by forgiving him for his past, because I also think that maybe what happened in his past before I came along was none of my business. I know I can't really prevent myself from having these feelings, but part of me wonders if its fair for me to even have these feelings.. Q3: 18.00…This week my question is about trauma. Is it silly to still be affected by a trauma even though a lot of time has passed since it happened? Or is it normal to still be hurting and having my thoughts be consumed by it sometimes? Q4: 22.00…I'm starting to feel a bit hopeless about my eating habits lately. I've been struggling with eating and my body image ever since I can remember. My Mum first put me on a diet when I was 1 1/2 years old and things sort of continued from then. Some days I think I should try to read lots of self-help books and try to find a way to work this out and on others I think I should just try to accept this as a part of myself and live with it. What do you think? Q5: 27.41… When working with a client/ patient on attachment issues, what steps do you take and what forms of healing do you take to work them through a very difficult issue? Q6: 30.37…Do you ever think it’s possible to overcome all PTSD triggers? Do you think it’s possible to never be triggered by things or am I just going to find certain things hard? Q7: 36.40…Where is the line between knowing what you want in a relationship and being too quick to judge? My therapist has been working with me on having conversations with people over dating apps. Sometimes I find myself not wanting to talk to someone because of their job or something they say about themselves. How do I know if I’m being too judgmental versus just figuring out what I want? Q8: 43.33… I'm about to graduate with my MSW and am coming to terms that I am not able to work a full time job due to my mental illness. I have a lot of shame around not being able to meet my own expectations or the general expectation that adults should work full time and support themselves. How do I get over this shame? Q9: 47.20… How do you deal with constant changes in treatment team members? How can I be open with the new people and existing treatment team without the constant fear of them leaving? Is it possible?? Q10: 52.21…I am a man who struggles to get any sort of sexual arousal. I am 36 years' old and am still a virgin. As I have never had a long-term relationship, there were some problems for which I went many years without seeking help. I am very bad at attracting anyone, and now I'm worried that my pool of options is going to be even smaller if I have to find someone for whom sex is not that important. I worry that I'm going to get lonelier and lonelier with time. Is that something that I should be worried about? Q11: 1.01.10…I've always had a DEEP fear of my parents dying. Ever since I was a tiny child. I can remember the fear from about age 2. So what will happen when I lose my parents? I think I always knew it would be awful but I'd have my soulmate friend to help me but she's dead so.... what can I do apart from talk about it in therapy once every few weeks? Q12: 1.11.52… I think I am depressed. I do not seem to be interested in working to improve myself anymore. I feel like I don't have the energy to try anymore. I don't know how to move forward from my failures. I don't know how to believe that maybe things will work out this time, or maybe next time. I am having great difficulty forcing myself to go through the motions to try and reach the bigger picture. Maybe I don't know how to set attainable goals? Perhaps I need to be patient with myself and reach for smaller things? But smaller things do not seem acceptable. I feel like I have to be more; and that makes me feel like I am unacceptable. Q13: At work (a workplace for people who can't or has difficulty getting a real job, it's called work training.) I was told in the last meeting with my boss I was welcome to tell them if I ever felt triggered. The thing is that after this meeting, and during I felt really triggered by his face. That sounds really stupid, but there was something about it, as if he had some kind of expression, or tenseness that made him look weird, and my mind has taken a snapshot of that and is now torturing me with it. That means I didn't tell him in that meeting, because what in the world am I supposed to say? The whole telling people I’m triggered by them sounds very complicated, how am I supposed to do that? Q14: 1.19.59… After 6 months and a lot of frustration, I will finally be in treatment in likely less than two weeks. I have a lot of mixed feelings about finally getting into treatment and I kind of feel like I’m facing an identity and life crisis. I’m not entirely sure I know who I am without my eating disorder, even when I was recovered a lot of the praise and attention I got was focused on my appearance. So now I’m at a weird point where I’m panicking because I’m about to go somewhere where my ED will be ripped away and I have no idea who I am as a person, or if I’ll ever be good enough at anything else. What if my ED was my only redeeming quality? What if I start recovering and realize that I am a really really awful human being that is rather useless at everything else? How do I stop spiraling with this and make sure that I don’t leave treatment being a worse person than when I went in? Q15: 1.26.44… Today, one of my coaches asked me to riff on this question, “what good things are trying to enter my life right now?” I came up with several and then all of the anxiety and old thought patterns and behaviors got even stronger. This project I’m working on feels so exciting and terrifying at the same time. I know I’m ready for this. It's a long time coming. I’ve sabotaged myself out of doing things like this for too long and I really don’t want to let that happen this time. How do I do the work while all of these old stories and habits are trying to keep me where I am? There must be a way to stop the cycle so I don’t sabotage myself for the billionth time, right? Q16: 1.33.12… What can someone do to change a deeply rooted core belief? Especially if it has rooted its way in enough to become merged with who you are? For example (and I'm sure this'll strike a chord with a lot of people) I can never convince myself that a person actually likes me and I'm not just another annoyance. How do people change these beliefs without seriously risking safety and sanity, or would a root like this be considered "past removal"? Q17: 1.38.36… How, and with whom, should I talk about really insane things I've thought or done? I feel like nowadays one can talk with just about anyone about depression, anxiety, even 'normal' delusional behavior like eating disorders. But what about the really crazy stuff. A while back I was in what I thought was a lifelong relationship, but I wasn't sexually satisfied. My partner wasn't particularly attracted to me and in trying to figure out how to fix things, I began to analyze my partner's sexuality. Over the course of more than a year I constantly analyzed and questioned my partner about her sexual preferences despite the fact that she asked me to stop. This was most definitely abusive and throat punch worthy and I was the abuser. How can I talk about that with my therapist? I'm so extremely ashamed of myself, and I know that I was acting selfishly and horribly. I find myself going to therapy and talking about depression, anxiety, stress. And so long as I don't talk about the gorilla in the room (my burning guilt at psychologically manipulating and tormenting my former partner) I might as well be talking about the weather. But I just can't bring myself to talk about this with my therapist. I'm too ashamed. Q18: 1.48.30… What happens in therapy after you tell your narrative? I’ve been in therapy for a few years and recently my therapist and I have been talking through my narrative. We have been doing it slowly so I don’t dissociate when I talk about it. Once I have told her my whole story what happens next? Do we go back to talking about the everyday triggers knowing a little bit more about what is being triggered? Or do we process the narrative more so it’s less charged when I talk about it? Q19: 1.51.20… I don’t know if living a year in lockdown finally caught up to me or if it is just the anticipation of the upcoming appointment with a therapist, but ever since about a week or so, my thoughts are just spinning and I can’t stop them. I struggled with anxiety before, but never like this. I tried distracting myself in various ways. Nothing really worked, the overthinking built up over a couple of days until I couldn’t bear it much longer, slipped up, and engaged in self-harming. The urges are still prominent (not engaging though), the overthinking however is finally down to a level I’m quite used to. So now I’m scared of anything like this happening again. In such a case, how do I best get through this and out of my head when nothing but harming myself seems to work? What can I do in the first place so my thoughts don’t escalate that much anymore? Could this be related to the therapy appointments, and if so should I just not do therapy? Because I did notice that in the week before and after the appointment I’m feeling all the feels and running my mind, however, in the weeks in between I can block it out and am mostly fine. So final question: is this “normal anxiety” or am I going crazy in a pandemic?

Katie K