Changing My Mindset

In the summer of 2022, I began having Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for my anxiety, OCD and depression. My aim was to begin changing my mindset and be in a much better position with my mental health. I had been on the waiting list for months after going through a hard time and seeking help from the doctor. As soon as I was granted a position for CBT, I began attending sessions with my therapist. It took a while for me to warm to my therapist and we were making good progress. I feel like for many of the sessions I left feeling like I had a lightbulb moment where the penny dropped, and I was seeing things much more clearly.

 

 

During one of these sessions, I spoke about the fact that I felt like I was quite a negative person. Even though I tried to approach as much as I could with happiness and optimism, there was a niggling side of me. A part of me that would be thinking of the worst case scenario and panicking about the little details of things. This was partly fuelled by my OCD, but also by environmental factors which I had seen as I was growing up. I made this my main focus throughout therapy to try and rectify… but then I got ghosted.

 

And no, I’m not trying to quote the podcase by Vogue Williams and Joanne McNally, I actually did get ghosted by my therapist. I was more than halfway through my therapy when I got a phone call from the receptionist at the NHS facility. All I was told that my therapist wasn’t feeling very fell and would therefor be moving his sessions online, or I could opt to see him face to face in a number of weeks. I opted to face to face, because I knew that I wouldn’t open up to somebody via Zoom. However, I never got a phone call to say that I could reschedule my appointment.

 

By the time three more months had passed, I decided to call them. The headway that I had initially made with therapy had gone and I felt like I was back at square one and in a bad place. I didn’t want to move backwards, so I was trying to be proactive by dealing with the issue. Regardless, after a phone call with the receptionist, I was informed that my therapist had returned to work at a different practice, but he didn’t want to keep my on his books. Therefore, I would be put back on the waitlist that once again would be anywhere between 10 and 12 months.

 

Not great news for somebody with organisational OCD and crippling anxiety. But learning this didn’t stop me from wanting to make a change. Always being a worrier and then kind of person that looked at the worse case scenario was tiring. It took so much energy for my thoughts to revert to the bad and for the positive side of my brain to fight against it. So, I took actions into my own hands.

 

I called myself out and documented my feelings.

I have found that sometimes, I build up feelings within myself, simply because I haven’t allowed them to come out. For example, if I am mad at something that happened at work, that feeling will intensify within until I allow it to have an outlet. Now, I am trying to acknowledge my feelings and validate them by documenting them and writing them down. I find that writing them down and seeing them, allows my head to recognise that I can now move on from that and get back to positivity.

 

Leant on humour.

Some may say that humous is a defence mechanism of mine, however I would say that it is more of a coping mechanism. When things get a little deep, I never mind leaning on humour to see me through. Humour makes things easy for me to digest. Not to mention it makes it easier for those around me to understand where I am coming from and what I am feeling without getting too deep. Throughout this whole process, I have heavily relied on humour.

 

I asked those around me to call me out.

I am very fortunate that I spend hell of a lot of time around the people that I love. Whether that is my friends, husband or even amazing colleagues. All these people, I am more than happy for them to call me out. I want them to pull me up on the ques that they see in me which aren’t positive. They see things in me that sometimes I don’t even see myself. It helps me to identify the more subconscious things that I do.

 

Accepted that it will take time.

When you are doing anything for your mental health, it isn’t going to be a straightforward process. Things take time. Especially when it comes to unpicking your way of thinking and remoulding it. I sometimes get frustrated with my lac of progress, but I also remember that this is a momentous thing that I am attempting to overcome alone.

 

This hasn’t been a straightforward journey. I know that I still have a very long way to go to changing my mindset. For many years, I have thought the way that I have. Within me, there is always a little battle going off and I want to shut off the negative side all together and only focus on the positive. One thing that does fill me with pride, is that even with the small changes that I listed above, people are seeing a difference. More than one person has told me how much bright and optimistic I seem. But not only that, I feel it too.