Voices
The problems with work book is i get to this certain part where my despair over takes me and it's just sitting there almost mocking me saying 'see? i told you, you can't do anything right, and i told you, you wont change' ... and I don't see any progress. And when I do see progress, it takes only ONE instance where I get the severe attack or situation that spirals out of control into tears, or severe depression etc.. to reinstate that 'See! I told you! you weren't going to make it' .....and of course it wont go away...that thought will continue to torment me. Call it the devil, call it my negative side, call it whatever you want...the TRUTH of the situation becomes embedded into those words... 'see! i told you, look at what just happened...you STILL felt the same way...what PROGRESS have I seen? NOTHING, you STILL feel that as strongly.'
And saying 'SHUT UP! GO AWAY ...I REBUKE YOU SATAN!' .......doesn't work. The feeling of DESPAIR does not leave, NOR does the depression. Once it happens, it only REINFORCES the failure ...that states your mind cannot be under control and you wont EVER heal.
Perfection is a hard animal to train. Like you I tried so hard to be perfect. That is a WT habit that is put in all JWs. No one is perfect and I agree that saying and feeling or knowing are 2 different things. The first big problem with being "perfect" is that we will always fail. And that sets up an unending cycle of failure. Not a great way to live as you have learned. The second problem with "perfect" is that there are only 2 options: "perfect" and "not perfect". I had to find something else that worked for me. This is what it was:
I'd rather be human than perfect. Being human means I can make mistakes. I can learn from those mistakes. Then instead of making the same mistake over and over I can go off and make other mistakes and learn from those. That is life. We humans make mistakes. But we are totally capable of learning and changing.
It is very easy to get depressed when you are constantly failing. So we try the same thing again and get the same result. You know that definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and getting the same result? We have to change what we do. For me that is where being human came in. I could do something different and I often failed. But that was ok. I learned and tried it another way and eventually I learned what worked and what didn't work. So I kept trying different things until I found what worked for me.
I guess I started looking at life as an number of experiences or lessons. Sometimes the experiemnt works. Great. Move on to the next experiment. Sometimes it doesn't work. Try finding a new way to tackle the problem. And sometimes that problem has to be put aside a while until I have a few other positive results under my belt and I can take the lessons from those to tackle the one I put aside.
I was seriously depressed from the age of 6 until I was 32. Most of that time i was suicidal but too scared to actually try anything. The last few years got me seriously close though. After leaving my abusive husband and the JWs and getting some therapy I can say I haven't thought of suicide once in the last 25 years. I never would have imagined a life without those thoughts in my head. The depression has gone too. I lived every waking minute feeling like i was not good enough, a failure. Gone. It can happen and I sure was surprised when one day I realized the thoughts and feelings were gone. It took some time. At the beginning there were only moments when it was gone. Then hours and then days. But when I finally realized I hadn't felt like that in a week or a month it was WOW! It almost felt like I lost an old friend except I didn't miss it at all.
The other thing about therapy that you have probably figured out is that it is more than just the time you spend in that office. It is a change in the way you think and how you act. If you change those 2 things eventually the feelings change as well.
Just don't give up. A life is a terrible thing to waste and the WTS had us all wasting our lives for a pipe dream. Now you get to have a life.
