The day after therapy

Having canned my psych for having little counselling benefit yesterday I have to eat my words. He was brilliant. When I spoke to him two weeks ago I was in the depths of an acute episode of depression. I had confided in him that I was pre-suicidal at that time. By that I mean I was in the depths of not being able to look after my daughter, my family, or myself and I started to feel there was little point to life - I was questioning the value of living. I was not thinking about killing myself but it was only one step before having those thoughts. This scared me because I have never felt this way before. Over the past five years I have had severe depression with all the symptoms (I think there's officially 10 or 11) except suicidal thoughts and ongoing thoughts about death. Well they came this last month and they came hard. My psych, who had given me follow up calls, pager access, etc., followed up in yesterdays appointment with some great counsel to ensure that I was able to reflect and handle those times of difficulty should they recur. It was the most effective counsel I had received from him ever. We also tweaked the dose of my medication as I had hoped and we were both optimistic that there would be a strong benefit by this change in regime.

I also organised pastoral counselling for today. That went really well. In the past I have found pastoral counselling invaluable. My last pastoral counsellor left to live over seas about three months ago so today was the first involvement of a pastoral counsellor for quite some time and it was well worth the effort. For me the thing that lays broken or aching throughout my depression is my 'soul'. Having the right pastoral counsellor during depression is an integral part of my recovery strategy to address the 'soul' issues. Consequently the pastoral counsellor is a key part of the 'team' I have assembled to see me through to recovery.

Over time I want to put some more juicy detail of the depression episodes on here as I know it is infinitely more interesting. I will do this as new episodes occur. However, as things settle down over the next week I will perhaps start writing some reflections of key experiences I have encountered throughout my depression. I will perhaps also post some reflections on tough times of the soul. The sad thing about blogging this information is that there is a lot of material to choose from!