Re: Can't calm down

[sdwa]

Well, I don’t know. For me, talk therapy tended to magnify rather than alleviate my problems…because what I put my attention on grows larger. I’d often leave feeling terrible because of the feelings brought up by the session, and it would take hours for me to return to Earth and normal functioning.

I struggle with intense moods and not being able to shift out of them. If I get upset, it can ruin a day, a week – however long it takes for me to get into a different frame of mind. I used to take long walks to burn off some of the tension. Sometimes it helps to go to an art gallery and feed my mind with images that get me thinking, or to a park where I can look at trees, flowers, water, the sky, etc and get away from urban energies. It can also help to watch a movie, preferably a comedy. I am extremely visual, so looking at pretty things helps, doing visualization exercises, carrying a picture of something that comforts me and serves as an emotional anchor. Sometimes I also pray, and I think prayer can work even if you don’t believe in God – the point is to access a sense of what is timeless or eternal, “the numinous,” or that quiet inner core we all have when we feel peaceful and clear, and listen to that voice. My problems are too big for me, so I appeal to a power greater than myself, the life force, the universe, the Great Spirit, whatever you want to call it. Sometimes it helps to draw pictures.

One-on-one therapy didn’t help me that much – I learned some things (one of which is unfortunately that a lot of therapists are bad at their jobs), but have found it more helpful, more “normalizing” and balancing, to participate in support groups with others who have similar experiences and challenges, and I like seeing the same group of people for a period of weeks, it kind of sets up a rhythm and continuity for me, which is nice because I tend not to be very socially active in my daily life.

It’s good if you can find someone to work with who knows about ADD/ADHD and has studied it, perhaps specializes in working with us. With my HMO insurance program, I didn’t feel like the counselors they employed were exactly Top Drawer, whether due to lack of training or to general burn-out or simply having been folks who should have gone into another line of work. And I couldn’t pay a therapist $300 an hour to go outside of that system. For me, learning more about ADHD helped me appreciate what it is exactly that I am dealing with, so I recommend reading about it, if you are a reader, and if not, a former coach of mine, Jeff Copper of DIG Coaching, has a weekly radio program on BlogTalk Radio, I think called Attention Talk Radio. You can probably Google him.

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