Prostokvasha

on being a therapist

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:15:00 +0000

Therapy is a mysterious process. Something unique happens when two souls meet in a circumscribed safe space. They affect each other in ways that are hard to describe to the outside world. Many people wonder what makes therapy special and what exactly produces results. When people hear about my training, they start asking me questions, or they make comments about therapy that are wrought with their own assumptions. Usually it's people who haven't experienced therapy for themselves.

I've been thinking about my answers to some of these common questions or comments, so here are my attempts to clear up some misconceptions:

Therapists get paid to be supportive and automatically like the people they work with.
Ethical therapists don't lie to their clients, ever. Sure, we receive some training on how to evade certain questions we feel would be harmful to answer, and we don't disclose too much personal information. But other than that, everything we say is truly what we think and how we feel. We are genuinely amazed by people, their survival and their abilities. We don't love our clients blindly and automatically, without any consideration of who they are, just because it's our job. We don't even necessarily love all aspects of our clients all the time. There are usually things we don't like as well, and when the time is right and the relationship is strong enough, your therapist will probably point those out. But therapy wouldn't be what it is if we didn't find beauty in all of our clients' souls. People, in their struggles, in their vulnerabilities, in pain, in perseverance, are pretty amazing. And this includes every person I have worked with up to now and will work with in the future.

What's the point of therapy; can't you just complain to your friends?
Therapy and friendship are similar and different. Both therapists and friends see people during painful and vulnerable points in their lives, and both like those people despite their faults and mistakes. However, therapists are trained to listen with a different ear. They open up a door in their hearts and take on pieces of people's struggles. Therapists listen to their clients, and they listen to themselves. Therapists listen to the tone in the room. Therapists listen for patterns, for significant motifs, for contexts. Therapists don't even really have any stakes in what you say; they just care about what it means to you. They care about how you're feeling now, and how you felt then. They care about your process through tough times, and they rejoice with you in happy times. So the next time you have an issue that you can't talk to your friends about or a feeling so unbearable it keeps you up at night – great! Talk to a therapist; that's what we're here for.

All people do in therapy is complain in the presence of another person, who just gets paid to listen.
Many people tell me that therapy is just about people whining. They ask me how I can choose to sit and listen to people's endless complaining. What they should be asking me is how I chose a profession that is actually one emotional mind-twist. We function on a completely different level than simply "tolerating whininess" and nodding our heads in automatic agreement. Through tuning in to people's emotions, we actually alter their experiences. Consider this hypothetical scenario: a man comes to therapy after growing up with an aggressive father and an absent mother. He has a general disposition of feeling angry, hurt, helpless, ineffectual, undermined, unappreciated. The female therapist, in her position of caretaking and authority, triggers those feelings, and he is usually angry at her in their sessions. But she, unlike his parents, recognizes those feelings, absorbs his anger without retaliating, and also appreciates and empowers him. Over time, he becomes less self-depricating and explosive, and gains a clearer and healthier sense of self. In other words, the process of therapy actually changes his internal experience. So the whining and the complaining is only the tip of the iceberg of everything that is bound to happen in therapy.

Life sucks, get over it. Everyone has issues, move on.
Occasionally I get the "what's the point of therapy; people just need to learn to suck it up" comment. Incidentally, this is a philosophical question that I (and I assure you, many other therapists) have asked myself as well: if therapy is a relatively new field and people have gone on living in tough circumstances and with painful emotions, then why change it all now and advocate that people get help and feel better? The answer is complex, but for me it boils down to these points: a) people have always sought the help of various healers, for emotional, relationship, sexual, existential, etc. issues; b) our knowledge of ourselves continues to grow, how can we not use it to help ourselves (see: medicine); and c) just because people "sucked it up" before, doesn't mean that they didn't suffer all their lives from emotional ailments that we now know are very preventable and healable. Who knows what was getting people through life before (wizards, tight communities, shorter lifespans, rigid social roles, religions?), now we have this tool that anyone can use to find healing and purpose. And I think everyone should give it a try.

Have anything else to add to how therapy works? Anything else left you curious about therapy?

on being an immigrant part 5.2

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:41:00 +0000

What I've worked out for myself so far stems in part from (drum roll please for how therapist of me this will sound) Freud's essay, Mourning and Melancholia. Therein he ponders the sources of sadness and effects of loss on people's beings. Reading every sentence of this essay has been like getting hit by a train of realization.

Of course there is no way of telling who I would have become if I hadn't moved away from my home, but I do know that as a kid, pre-immigration, I was happy, imaginative, rambunctious, and a leader of all the other kids in the neighborhood. I had hardships and difficulties, yes, but I also had many people around me for support and I felt a sense of belonging there. Since coming to the U.S., at least, (and it has been close to 15 years now), I have felt a low-grade but ever-present sense of sadness, loneliness, and somewhat emptiness. It's not that I am depressed; I have energy and friends and interests. I have some zest for life. And it's not that I am completely empty either. My life does have purpose; my personal and professional goals give me a sense of meaning. And yet, I go through life feeling sad and lonely, without a heartfelt connection to many things in the world, my existence sometimes seeming futile. Deep down, I'm melancholy.

In his funky and specialized, yet precise and well-thoughtout way, Freud writes this (emphasis is mine):

Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition. It is also well worth notice that, although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful (p. 243).

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. This picture becomes a little more intelligible when we consider that, with one exception, the same traits are met with in mourning. The disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same. Profound mourning, the reaction to the loss of someone who is loved, contains the same painful frame of mind, the same loss of interest in the outside world—in so far as it does not recall him—the same loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love (which would mean replacing him) and the same turning away from any activity that is not connected with thoughts of him. It is easy to see that this inhibition and circumscription of the ego is the expression of an exclusive devotion to mourning which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests (p. 244).

It is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love. One feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious (p. 245).

In mourning we found that the inhibition and loss of interest are fully accounted for by the work of mourning in which the ego is absorbed. In melancholia, the unknown loss will result in a similar internal work and will therefore be responsible for the melancholic inhibition. The difference is that the inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely. The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning—an extraordinary diminution in his self- regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself (p. 246).

Even through Freud's jargon, my condition becomes much more clear to me now: I lost a loved object (the country, the city, the home base, the culture, the language, the people, the sense of belonging) and I have not processed the loss in any conscious or tangible way. In a sense, I am stuck in a loop of "pathological" mourning: I am sad and unable to allow myself to love a new object (new country, new language, new culture, new people) that might "replace" the old one. Because I've acculturated well enough--to the outside world, it looks like I fit in with the new environment--the loss is harder to see, and yet, my entire being is in many ways absorbed in this self-depricating confusing loop of pseudo-mourning. When there is nothing outside of myself to put a finger on, it is I, not the world, that becomes empty and dark.

For now, I am thankful for this clarity and new perspective. It doesn't make the pain any easier, yet, but I know that I am moving in a healing direction. All I can do for now is let myself be still, listen to what is going on inside, and be patient with the timing and unfolding of this process.

on being an immigrant 5.1

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:37:00 +0000

Everything I write on this topic seems trite. The words in my head fail me miserably. Is there really a way to describe the width and depth of a painful experience?

***

This picture is how I spent my adolescence. And even though I'm an adult now--an adult who doesn't always sit around sulking and who maybe has a better capacity for tolerating emotions--doesn't mean that somewhere inside I don't still look like this.

Source

I often resort to wearing black, and now I know that it's because black actually is the color of my soul. At least for now, because I'm mourning. Turns out, my life has included a lot of unmourned things that require mourning. The best I can promise myself right now is that I will try as best as I can, considering I've had poor examples and little experience truly mourning losses.

***

I roll my eyes at myself and feel sad about meaningful parts of my life all at the same time.

on being an immigrant 4

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:56:00 +0000

My therapist told me that I have to forgive myself for leaving my home country.

I've been thinking about this phrase for a few hours now, letting it sink in. I, forgive myself.

Am I angry at myself? Am I sad, deeply, with myself? I didn't think so; I wasn't the one who decided to immigrate. Yet this phase made so much sense. What chord was it striking?

It's easy for me to be angry and sad about my childhood circumstances. It's easy to blame the people who plucked me away from an environment where I was comfortable, where I felt supported, where I knew a sense of connection and belonging to those around me. Yet, in some twisted way, I'm punishing myself for being here, and for not being there. This punishment is covert and subtle. It exists mostly in the fundamental grief I feel about being whoever I am now.

Forgiveness is part of the grieving process, and the grieving process is part of healing. So here I am, hopefully on the road to becoming less sad about my autobiography and to feeling OK about my self.

on being an immigrant part 3

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:30:00 +0000

For the most part, overall in life, being bi-cultural is cool and advantageous. I guess. I mean, I can speak two languages and intimately understand two separate world views. I can communicate with a substantial portion of the world and I can even connect people through translation and interpretation. Knowing English is a huge advantage in general, of course, and stating that I am fluent in Russian on a CV is also impressive. I feel special for having extra skills and an edge when it comes to navigating our multicultural world. Having a U.S. passport also gives me traveling rights to most places, whereas having a Russian passport means I never have to deal with visa paperwork to visit my home country. Most people stop at these apparent benefits and proceed to tell me how lucky I am to have had such life circumstances.

But being bi-cultural, for me, is an unending identity crisis without a solution. It's as if my self exists in two towers, with just a few dangly bridges connecting them. There is some communication between the two towers; information can pass back and forth over the bridges. But these connections are tenuous, sometimes slow and sometimes dangerous. Some things never even pass from one side to the other.

Source: 20aday

In my mind's eye, I picture the tower on the right to be the Russian one and the left one to be American*. My self momentarily resides in the tower that corresponds to the context in which I find myself, but most often it runs back and forth between the two towers (my soul is fit?) depending on my various thoughts and moods. So if I am talking to my family in Russia on the phone, for example, I speak mostly from within the Russian tower. But most of the other time, I'm forced to function from the American tower, to effectively adapt to U.S. culture and not seem like such a strange stranger.

But then it gets even more complicated. The two towers are separate enough entities, but they can never be fully distinct. The bridges connecting them are permanent and I can never sever a connection with one identity or the other. When I function from within one of the towers, I know the other exists. There are bridges, doors and windows that cannot close. The other tower always casts a shadow on whatever I am doing within the first tower-context. Also, the Russian tower began building from birth, whereas the American one started construction in adolescence, and thus the Russian one is more sturdy and fundamental. I think my self lives there most of the time, even when I am in the U.S. and even when I speak English, although like I said, towers always cast shadows on each other.

Confused yet? I know I am. This bi-cultural chaos is my daily life inside my head. I try to be fully appreciative of the advantages of my situation, but sometimes it's me who considers single-tower people the lucky ones.

*The therapist in me would chuckle here at the fact that my Russian side feels so right and America is just so gauche!

knock knock

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 05:26:00 +0000

Is blogging obsolete at this point? Have people ventured over to the multitude of social networking sites, leaving this one-sidedness behind? Or maybe it's just me: I've been feeling sad, stressed, and uninspired lately. So there is hardly a point to come here and hardly a thought I want to express...

But it's the new year already, and people all over the place are promising to improve and stick to their resolutions. I'm not a fan of resolutions, personally. I already function under so many goals and deadlines, evaluations and expectations for growth that when I sit with myself, I really just want to be ok with who and where and how I am. That's hard. I think if I were to put a finger on any one "goal" it would be to meditate more, to get to know pieces of myself that I don't usually engage in daily life. I'd like to be more physical, not for the sake of appearance, but to use my body more than I have been. I love yoga, I love hiking, I love swimming and biking, so I hope that my life in 2012 would involve more of those things on a weekly basis.

People generally seem optimistic at the start of the year, and I guess this year has a lot in store for me. I need to get grounded; I need to get well. I'm ready.

things I learned about myself in therapy

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 06:28:00 +0000

Turns out, I am somewhat shy and fairly introverted. I have some social anxiety and I usually get anxious and easily overwhelmed around groups of people. I am fairly inhibited and I have to feel pretty safe with others before revealing my feelings. I definitely have performance anxiety and, like many people, I get very nervous when I talk or do anything in front of others.

These are things I already knew about myself, at least in the back of my mind. As in, I could have described myself in these terms, and yet, I would have still judged myself when all those things would happen to me in various situations. Therapy has helped me not only to accept these things as simply characteristics of myself, but it has also taught me how to manage them in order to seem less like an anti-social trembling weirdo.

Here is what social psychologists say about shyness:

Shyness can arise from different sources. In some cases, it may be an inborn personality trait. In other cases, shyness develops as a learned reaction to failed interactions with others. Thus, interpersonal problems of the past can ignite social anxieties about the future.

Ok, I don't know how I acted as an infant, but I certainly think that many interactions with others have failed me in my past. Or at least, maybe for one, shyness is what happens when one is uprooted from the safety of a social support system, brought to another culture in preadolescence, and forced to interact with strange people in a foreign language. Just a thought.

Whatever the source, shyness is a real problem, and it has painful consequences. Studies show that shy people evaluate themselves negatively, expect to fail in their social encounters, and blame themselves when they do.

Wait, maybe I don't seem like an anti-social trembling weirdo to others?

As a result, many shy people go into self-imposed isolation, which makes them feel lonely, or in other words, deprived of social relations. Their loneliness is triggered by a discrepancy between the level of social contact that they have and the level that they desire.

Who knew that my loneliness was, at least in part, caused by my social anxiety, which was caused by failed social interactions in my past, which were caused by various emotionally-unavailable family members and, you know, immigration. It's also good to know that there may be hope for me after all.

In any case, this is all very interesting and relevant, considering I'm about to make a profession out of interacting with people, through teaching, advocating and therapizing. But at least these issues of mine aren't huge and I am certainly learning how to work around, with, and through them.

my brain on grad school

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:41:00 +0000

This is pretty much my life. I am in my 4th year of grad school and my ambitions went from Abolish Sexism to work for an influential organization, like the UN! to publish ~~anything~~ something that someone will maybe even read one day to put on a shirt and brush my hair in the morning.

So this is where I am. This academic year I am hoping to take things down a notch. I am hoping to really focus, to figure out what in life is important, and to take better care of myself. The latter will involve self-compassion*, which is an astonishingly simple and difficult thing to practice:

Self-compassion entails three main components: (a) self-kindness--being kind and understanding toward oneself in instances of pain or failure rather than being harshly self-critical, (b) common humanity--perceiving one's experiences as part of the larger human experience rather than seeing them as separating and isolating, and (c) mindfulness--holding painful thoughts and feelings in balanced awareness rather than over-identifying with them.

I don't really understand why so many people are so bad at this, and I am certainly one of the ones who is. So I am learning to be gentle with myself and to cherish my small accomplishments of every day.

* My linguist husband objects to this term, because it literally translates to self-co-suffering, which I guess is an impossibility. I told him that I am practicing self-compassion by refraining from stabbing him with my pen. I also hold him that he may think of a better term, if he so desires, and then we'll talk. Because I am that diplomatic and ready for work at the UN!

on being an immigrant 2

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 23:40:00 +0000

Because I work in an agency that specializes in providing social and mental health services to immigrants in San Francisco, we talk a lot about issues of loss, nostalgia, otherness, and identity. Many of the staff are immigrants themselves, which helps us to think about, personally analyze and relate to these topics and experiences. So people at work recommended that I read Salman's Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, and when I was buying it online, a list of authors they thought I would like popped up, including people like Nabokov and Milan Kundera. I laughed out loud because these are some of my favorite authors and it's true, many are transplants and most write about the concept of home and life somewhere else. I guess I relate to their stories and look for answers on how the characters resolved their unbearable feelings of not belonging and living in a world that is so unfamiliar.

So I am reading Imaginary Homelands and after every word I want to jump up, throw my hands in the air and shout, "Yes!" He totally gets it. He gets what it's like to be a foreigner in the country of citizenship and yet to have a familial connection to the country of birth. He is eloquent and good at putting a finger on that struggle of finding, or having to invent, a homeland. I wanted to quote some things here, to bookmark, to remember, but then I would be quoting the entire book. So instead I decided on this snippet about dreams and reality and the basis for social status of foreigners:

In common with many Bombay-raised middle-class children of my generation, I grew up with an intimate knowledge of, and even sense of friendship with, a certain kind of England: a dream-England composed of Test Matches at Lord's presided over by the voice of John Arlott, at which Freddie Trueman bowled unceasingly and without success at Polly Umrigar; of Enid Blyton and Billy Bunter, in which we were even prepared to smile indulgently at portraits such as "Hurree Jamset Ram Singh", "the dusky nabob of Bhanipur". I wanted to come to England. I couldn't wait. And to be fair, England has done all right by me; but I find it a little difficult to be properly grateful. I can't escape the view that my relatively easy ride is not the result of the dream-England's famous sense of tolerance and fair play, but of my social class, my freak fair skin and my "English" English accent. Take away any of these, and the story would have been very different. Because of course the dream-England is no more than a dream.

I can't espace this view either, because it has to be true. My fair skin and my American accent have gotten me places. But they also create some internal conflicts:

1. They render me invisible. Sure, at times it's good to pass, to not be recognized or picked out of a crowd or questioned. But invisibility can be damaging in that I never know where to stick myself, or how to behave, to how to let people know I may not be who they think I am.

2. Because of this invisibility, there is no community. Because I don't know where to stick myself and because other people don't always know what to do with me once I am stuck there, there is no support or sense of belonging. It's possible that other white immigrants resolve this by conforming to the dominant culture and feeling a part of it. But for me both external and internal forces must have prevented this, so I am left without a home and only with imaginary homelands.

I know there were other points, but I just became exhausted with all this and embarrassed at sounding so emo. So I guess I'll just leave it at what it is.

on being an immigrant

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 19:39:00 +0000

Being a white immigrant (someone who appears white, is generally not questioned in public, and checks the Caucasian box on Census forms, but someone whose features definitely don't look all-American (whatever that means, but I'm sure you pictured something in your head); someone who (sadly? conveniently? awesomely?) speaks English "without an accent! How did you learn to speak so well!", but someone whose name people pause to pronounce; someone who has lived in the American educated middle-class coming here in adolescence, but who ran from poverty and a collapsing political and social regime in her home country, and someone who generally feels usually like an outcast wherever she goes) is weird.

The memories of this weirdness came back to me when the other month I got together with a friend from high school who is moving out of San Francisco. We went to high school in the Midwest, where I moved from Russia (well, with a stop in Germany for two years for my mom's job) without speaking any English. Identity development in adolescence is tough, and identity development in a foreign country in a foreign language with foreign social rules and few friends is pretty outrageously difficult. I realize now how xenophobic even the liberal pockets of the Midwest are and it was apparent even in our conversations with this friend. Some aspects of our conversation felt awkward, probably only to me, because it brought me back to those formative adolescent years of still being an outsider.

But city life over here is also quite politically loaded. I read articles like this on race and gentrification and think about what it would mean for me, who looks white and reaps social benefits because of it, to try and live in a community of foreigners in hopes that they might accept me for my feelings of otherness. It's complicated.

So my status here in the United States of America, how I feel about myself, my position, where I fit, how I am perceived, is still pending. Maybe eventually I will become ok with the ambiguity of being a stranger.

summer survival

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 06:02:00 +0000

If you were to ask me exactly how stressed out I have been, I would answer you with this: last month for the first time in my 15 menstruating years, I skipped my period. And I know that this is nothing more than stress, because a) I peed on about 930293409234 pregnancy tests and they were all negative, and b) I got my period this month. So yup, this is just another blatant example of how much damage my body is physically going through as I plug away in grad school*.

I have realized something that is almost laughable in its simplicity. Namely that I am no longer interested in learning how to manage stress, given the amount of stress currently residing on my shoulders. Rather, I need to get things off my plate, reduce the baseline amount of stress in my life, and watch as things become much more manageable. So now finally, I am quitting projects, I am becoming ok with not being involved here and there, and I am attempting to replenish the cocoon that normally buffers me from the external world.

Redwoods in Northern California

Which involves getting away on the weekends and spending some moments in the woods, on the sand, following trails, looking for tracks, exploring new shores and rediscovering old ones. Anything that pulls me away from metro systems and desk tasks and the emotional vulnerability that comes with the profession; every little bit helps.

Beach time on Lake Tahoe

So that during the week, on long Tuesday nights with hours of work again of me, I can smell the sun on my skin and remember the sounds of pine trees rustling.

* Other examples of stress-related un-health that continue to exasperate my adrenaline-flooded body include: ridiculously damaging eating habits, ridiculously damaging sleeping habits, ridiculously damaging substance use, and this new one: near-constant joint pain.

crescent moon

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 17:19:00 +0000

Gypsy String Music @ Freight & Salvage...

Lists & Thoughts:

1) Turns out, I close my eyes and twiddle my thumbs to music. A familiar familial image. Nature, nurture, or nostalgia?

2) I close my eyes and listen to my breath match rhythmically with harp accords. I watch my thoughts evaporate in green curlicues.

3) Gypsy music connects me to my ancestors from the Caucuses (the true Caucasians), the trojan horses, the frauds, the foreigners in classical, aristocratic St. Petersburg.

4) It's clear: being nomadic, being a stranger in a strange land is in my blood with an intensity that ebbs and flows like tides that crash across rocky shores.

5) Otherness and familiarity both define my existence.

6) My distant dreams, the stars in my head: to live in Russia once again, to learn and play folk music, and, to join my grandpa in the armchair, giant headphones over our ears, and twiddle our thumbs.

still surviving

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 06:07:00 +0000

Possibly. Barely. Persistently.

Although wouldn't it be nice to have someone not let me choke on the noose around my neck?:

But then, why aren't there any women in this video? And the fact that the band is all-male hardly counts as a true explanation.

experience the warmth

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 06:36:00 +0000

The breaking point turned out to be a breaking ~~year~~ month. It's like I've been held under water all this time and I am only now coming up for air. I feel like my being has been living as a lump in my throat, somewhere between my brain and my vital organs. It has obstructed my breathing in, my breathing out, and any communication between my heart and my mind. I have not been connected to any part of my internal body and I have lost contact with an essential part of my intuition. Only now do I realize that there is also a ladder in my throat and that my being is free to move throughout. There is so much room inside my self that I get dizzy when I close my eyes and turn my gaze within. And all of it is waiting to be me.

perhaps the breaking point

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 05:10:00 +0000

This year has been (and continues to be) utterly horrible. I am still not done with it, even, so my absence here is only a testament to my exhaustion. I am too tired to reach out, like I am the one drowning so I can't throw myself a lifejacket. Each year of grad school has been worse than the one before so far. Maybe because each year carries the weight of the last and then snowballs exponentially (I don't even know if a snowball can snowball exponentially, that just might be a mathematic improbability, but I'm going with it at this point, because if there is one thing I have learned in grad school, it's that I need to be gentler with myself because no one else will be). Each week that passes carries with it disappointments and critiques and traumatic experiences. I have no time to recover, and I think that people around me are waiting for me to break in order to pull back a bit from all this craziness. But how do I know what the breaking point is until I reach it?

Perhaps having fever for a week, getting joint pains in my wrists and ankles, and failing an exam that I really ~~should've~~ could've passed because I was just that exhausted, burnt out, anxious, and incomprehensible (I am retaking it next week) is just it?

So. Old rule out; new rule: even though this summer I will still be working ~50 hrs/week at two mental health agencies simultaneously while also volunteering on crisis lines and possibly running a domestic violence support group in Russian, I am making a conscious self-care plan for myself: therapy 3-4 times/month, energy-focused massage once/month (I've never had one of those before, but this is Berkeley and they are all the rave!), rowing team because I loved it when I did it in the past, and yoga as often as I can because I miss my meditative mental space*. This all costs money (and time), which has been one of my biggest hesitations, but you know what, the other way of living is costing me my health (and I don't even have health insurance, so go ahead and chew on that irony!)

And goddam, this better work.

* I'm aware of the fact that this list makes me sound obnoxious and ridiculous. (Though better obnoxious than loosing my mind, perhaps?) But mostly, I hope, I sound like I've discovered where the resources are (because it's true!). And now I'm telling you: there are resources, in every community (I'm willing to bet). You don't have to be super wealthy or super fancy or super cool or super relaxed or super anything to use many of them. You just have to be super. Which you are. So go ahead and enjoy what your community has to offer.

upcoming mother's day feelings

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Sat, 07 May 2011 03:54:00 +0000

I am still in that adolescent (maybe younger?) stage on this issue, where my emotions are intense and confusing. I wasn't allowed to feel much, or at least not to express any guilt-inducing dangerous emotions like anger and hurt. I wasn't allowed to have a voice and I am still working out some way to be.

So here are some feeling according to Smashing Pumpkins lyrics:

Despite all my rage I'm still just a rat in a cage

Pink ribbon scars
The never forget
I tried so hard
To cleanse these regrets
My angel wings
Were bruised and restrained
My belly stings

Maybe one day I'll channel my feelings into art and help others know that they are not alone.

all the way down

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Tue, 03 May 2011 07:45:00 +0000

In the middle of another gruesome year, I am also dealing with childhood emotional abuse. It seems awkward, harsh and guilt-inducing to even say this out loud, but it is what it is, and when feelings are involved, it's always best to be honest. This whole thing of sorting things out is somewhat incongruous with the essence of Russian daughterhood, where the bottom line is to understand and accept whatever parents could offer at the time and be thankful. And surely, I do understand, but it's the latter two states that I have yet to master. I'm getting there.

I am not going to go into details of my journey here right now, but all I can say is that if I could represent my mental state musically, it would be a desperate attempt to jump from here to there.

memoriam

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 22:03:00 +0000

March 17th marked a year since my friend's suicide, and all this time has been quite a journey. In the year, I cycled from anger and disbelief to general sadness and anxiety to fear of the Bridge to transforming the Bridge into a memorial, and feeling generally at peace about it.

And to now being able to remember and honor her life. On the anniversary, I wrote a poem in her memory, just something informal to commemorate her, the event, and my personal reconstruction.

I think sometime soon I will go to the Bridge and read this poem there quietly. Then I will burn the paper so the flames meet the atmosphere and so the ash falls into the water. Fire is often a symbol of purification and rebirth, and out of death always comes life, new ideas, and a new purpose.

boy (or girl?), am I frustrated

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 07:36:00 +0000

what if

I broke up sentences

that got too long

like this

then maybe

it would get

a bit more

easier to breathe

with one word

following the other

like steps

one foot

behind and one

ahead

transformation

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 09:08:00 +0000

In January, a friend came to visit me from Ireland and of course one of the items on her tourist list was to walk on the Golden Gate Bridge. And yes, even after all this time, I was still nervous to actually walk on what I viewed as a killing machine, and not a beautiful landmark. Since my friend's suicide, I'd only driven on it twice, very quickly, while focusing on the road. I pictured that being on the bridge on foot would be really intimate, like there we were, in direct contact with each other. On the other hand, I feared that it would feel inescapable, in case anything came up for me, or I ran into a suicidal person.

I talked about this with my therapist and she suggested that I light a candle or bring flowers or say kind words for my friend while on the bridge. This would reframe the monument into a memorial, kind of in the way that tombstones are eery but useful for remembering. So on the way there, we stopped to buy a candle, and while we were right over the churning dark waves, I lit it, had a moment of silence, and left the burning candle (in its fire-proof protective casing) by one of the towers. Others passed it, looked and probably understood. Maybe it even deterred a few people that day or at least provided solace to possible friends and family of the deceased. Interestingly enough, this simple deed really worked to transform my view of the bridge, and it is now no longer a scary means for death, but a quiet, elegant memorial to the sad circumstances under which people choose to end their pain. When I catch a glimpse of it now from any corner of the Bay, I send a few thoughts to the fallen souls. Maybe they really did find a sense of other-worldly peace...

Photo belongs to Jennbawa

Still, while we were on the bridge lighting the candle, a strange man kept pacing from the tower to the railing and back to the tower. It was a gloomy windy day, so he'd look down at the waves and return to the safety of the tower nook. His behavior seemed sketchy enough that my heart started to pound hard and fast. The statistics were against him: he was alone, he was a man, he looked disheveled like he might have been drinking. I really wasn't in the right state of mind to deal with it, but my crisis training would not let my conscience go. I had to find out what was going on. In an awkward way, I asked how he was feeling, and he said he was fine. Oh, he was just waiting for his friend and friend's son who wanted to walk just a little bit further. He was knowledgable about boats and so was watching the freight ships perusing the Bay underneath. Later, as we drove on the bridge on our way home, I saw him walking with another man and a boy. So he wasn't lying; he was alive and well, and I breathed a sigh of relief. He probably tells the story now of how some random girl bothered him out of nowhere to see if he was ok. But asking proactively is the way to take care of each other, and concern and curiosity may very well be the first step in saving someone's life.

if the sun don't come

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 08:28:00 +0000

Clarity about my life only happens in little snippets these days.

Because I am burnt out. Really really burnt out. I don't talk, write, or think anymore. Or, let me rephrase: of course, all I do day in and day out is listen, talk, write, and think. But I can no longer do it for myself.

I now know that compassion fatigue is a real thing. It happens when there is just too much crap (i.e., terrifying, heartbreaking feelings and information about humanity) poured (people are there for a service) on me (my heart, my soul, my brain, my mind, my limbs, whatever other parts make me a me), and not enough support (systemically, logistically, personally) to hold it all together. So I've become tired and apathetic, like every other beginning therapist. Talking about a murder-suicide of your close friends who weren't found for 10 days after the deed? Yup, I know, the world is indeed a horrible place. And there is not a whole lot I can do about that*.

A professor described my practicum experience as a battle field. Which is such a lovely picture, no? Every hour we go into our rooms with clients to be wounded, slashed, and assaulted**. We come out battered and bleeding, sometimes contaminating the spaces of others. We are truly in the trenches of our work here and we are barely armed. The bandages in county-funded community mental health agencies are few.

However, I do notice that outside of the battle field, things seem more feasible. When I rest a bit and cease being a robot, I am a lot more aware of my reactions to things and people. And I have many more coping skills. So I guess, as trite as it may seem, whatever doesn't kill you, really does make you stronger. So hopefully your therapist really is a hunk of emotional steel. Wrapped in an empathetic bubble dress with a soft, comforting smile, of course.

* I can help people process through and eventually come to terms with this set of events.

** Not by any malice of our clients, of course, but by the very virtue of therapy. The stories, situations, circumstances, and emotions we hear and experience hurt us, too. But we are there to think about and digest all of that sensory information, and present it back in some manageable way. Helping clients understand themselves by understanding our experiences with the clients is the gist of a lot of the work. And that takes a lot of feeling and thinking. To the point that sometimes I forget to (or cannot/will not/better not) feel and think about my own emotions in the rest of life.

unanswered

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 07:30:00 +0000

On Saturday was the birthday of my school friend who committed suicide earlier this year. Our mutual classmates have posted various notes about it here and there.

It's surreal to celebrate the Birthday of someone who also has a Deathday. Suddenly it seems strange, and maybe a little trite, that all of our lives we celebrate this one day on which we are born, but nearing the day we die. Which becomes more important or more memorable after that point?

Somehow birthdays seem reserved for people who are living, but I guess we all choose different days and moments to honor the departed, a birthday as good as any other special memory.

On Saturday, we should have all been out getting cupcakes. Instead "Dream On" came on in the car and I cried. There is no happy ending.

Sing with me, sing for the year
Sing for the laughter, sing for the tear
Sing with me, if it's just for today
Maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away

rained out

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 06:34:00 +0000

a phone picture of Berkeley

Winter in the Bay Area comes in a variety of wet adjectives: foggy, rainy, misty, humid, stormy. I like this much better than the mocking rays of the sun that follow me all through the fall. They say sunny weather correlates with happy mood, but for me, it only matches my annoyance at all things bright and confrontational. So this wintery gloominess, this foggy mellowness is quite a welcome environment for me to float in. I love gliding through the hazy streets and watch the unfocused city lights flicker through rain drops. Finally there is water all around me, and I feel in my element.

Holy Hill is a foggy hill

no homecoming

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 05:28:00 +0000

The seasons here are just the opposite of what I am used to. I've only lived in places where summers are hot and muggy, falls are rapid decreases in temperature, winters are dry and frigid, and springs are pleasant, blooming, and inviting. Now switch the names of the seasons with those 6 months apart while leaving the descriptives and you get the year's cycle in the Bay Area. Yes: summers are cold and cloudy, falls are sunny and mild, winters are humid and rainy, and springs seem like uncertain times between the coolness of December and the coolness of July. My first year here I thought I may have accidentally moved to the Southern Hemisphere, it being opposite-season land. I don't know if I've yet found my way back up to the Northern one, mentally.

some people have it worse

noreply@blogger.com (daria) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 11:12:00 +0000