1066 All Stars

A few months ago I decided to start a new blog series, exploring the roots of my mental health issues. I would work backwards through my life, picking out the key instances and exploring them in more detail. After completing the first part, I moved on, both distracted by other pursuits and having little desire to go over redundancy and parenting again.

With my recent experience of CBT, a desire to explore the underlying causes of my behaviour once again presents itself. This time though I want to start at the beginning. This will be a difficult blog to write, I will be covering areas that I have, deliberately, never covered before. I cannot promise how well it will be written but it will be raw, open and honest. 

But first, let's deal with the present day.

Confide In Me

It can be difficult deciding to confide in another person. Will they understand? Will they laugh? Will they cry? To some extent I have been so open that there is little left to confide. I have suffered from depression and anxiety. I have deep rooted self esteem issues. I spent three months at the Priory Hospital receiving treatment and I am currently seeing a CBT therapist. These things are known.

But no matter how openly I have blogged, there remain details that I omit. I tend towards writing in broad, brush strokes, leaving out the specifics, the mundane, the daily flare ups that no one else sees that drive my thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Often they are internalised, sometimes they involve others.

This week I took the step of confiding in a friend. I was scared and I was nervous. It was both a difficult and embarrassing conversation and after, I felt both relief and guilt; relief that I had shared the burden; guilt that I had found it necessary to do so in the first place. And I felt ashamed too, of how I had acted and what I had thought.

The irony is that, in hindsight, the issues were trivial. There was no shocking revelation, no earth shattering reveal. Instead, it was a step-by-step walkthrough of just how deep my self confidence issues go with some very specific examples of how they cause me to think and act. A fundamental sense of inferiority drives the feeling that I am not good enough. In turn, I often find myself feeling isolated and lonely, despite being surrounded by people. Pinpointing individual events, I explained how I interpreted them, how they became 'evidence' in my quest to prove the theory that I wasn't popular, wasn't needed and wasn't wanted. I had ranked myself and come in last place, competing in a race in which I was the only entrant. 

The question remains, why do I feel this way? Our discussion hit on a sound metaphor, looking at friendships as the pillars of our life. In years past, my pillars consisted of family, friends, work and, bizarrely, Football Manager. Each pillar would grow or shrink depending on circumstances but as I approached my time at the Priory, the work pillar dwarfed them all, unbalancing the whole structure.

Post therapy, I find two of my pillars have changed. The Football Manager pillar was removed by choice whilst the work pillar has reduced to normal size. But in so doing, I have created a gap that needs to be filled.

Work accounted for so much of my time and energy that, Football Manager aside, I had little interest in anything else. It defined me and gave me a sense of purpose. With that crutch removed, a new pillar needed to take its place and so for the first time in many years, I sought to put work on the backburner and focus on inter-personal relationships. But to my surprise, an underlying issue had not been resolved. Work was an unfaithful mistress that I thought was giving me something I needed whilst secretly cheating on me behind my back. And so although I didn't know it at the time, I found myself seeking something that I felt I lacked and needed; validation.

And this is the fundamental root cause of my mental health issues. Validation. The idea that my sense of value and worth comes not from within but from others. Add in underlying anxiety issues and you have a toxic stew. Feeling inadequate in myself, I seek approval from others whilst at the same time anxiety causes a hyper-stimulation so that I become over sensitive to the normal ebb and flow of life. Had a crossed word? That person hates me and therefore I'm no good. A friend laughed at someone else's joke? They're funny, I'm not and they like them more than me which means I am no good. Judgement had already been passed, the case was closed; no matter what evidence I produced, I was guilty as charged.

The ludicrousness of it all is that I have friends, I have family and I have a wife and children. I can't be all that bad. So why is this not enough? Why do I still seek validation when I have surely received it? Partly it is circumstantial. It is a point I have made a few times recenlty but, outside of family (who live miles away, a point not to be dismissed), I have always had a very small circle of close, long-term friends; the best man from home; the multi-time flatmate; the special lady in Wales; and of course my best friend, who I was lucky enough to marry. At last, I am making new friendships, ones that I value as much as the existing circle. Even still, I have made my world extremely small, an island that goes largely unnoticed. And even if seen, I remain doubtful that anyone would want to stay. I want to reach out and extend my circle but I am frightened of being rejected.

Add to this therapy. It was a truly life altering experience but it comes with a price to be paid. I spent years suppressing, ignoring or flat out not feeling emotions. I was arrogant, dismissive and cold before anxiety took over and crippled me. Therapy was, in part, a reprogramming of the mind. Coming out of the other side, I find myself experiencing life in a different way. I feel empathy, compassion and kindness. But I don't always know what to do with these emotions and how to express them. I feel I am a much softer person than I used to be, undoubtedly in part because of the children, but I am also more vulnerable. For the most part the mask stays in place, lest someone discover the real me. I want to let people in but I convince myself they don't want to come.

I find myself at the edge of my known world, the ocean of doubt stretching away in front of me, the distant lands of happiness, fulfilment and inclusion on the horizon. I want to set sail and yet I am afraid in case the boat sinks or I am thrown overboard. These are my first tentative steps into a brave new world, one that I hope to make rather bigger than the old.

Sharing our inner most thoughts and feelings with others can be frightening. I consider myself blessed to have people in my life who want to listen.

Still To Come

Phew, that was a rather longer opening post than I expected so let's end this piece here and I'll break the rest into different posts. Coming up;

• Chunk
• Arrogant
• All By Myself
• University Challenged
• Closer Than Close
• The Other Karen
• Here Come The Girls
• I Do
• Dare To Risk It All