dEhiN’s Blog

I’m going to get quite personal in this post; I have been debating in my mind how personal I should get with this blog, but at times like this blogging helps me to focus my thoughts and perhaps by my sharing others can be encouraged. Also, I don’t recall how much I’ve shared in previous posts and I can’t be bothered to check right now, so if any of what I share is ‘old news’, bear with me.

I’ve been going to counseling for about 1.25 years now, and the purpose is to work through the various issues I struggle with deep down. In many ways we all have issues we are working through. But some people, like myself, have issues that are quite deep and complex; they are usually the type that cause people to see counselors and/or go on medication. They are also usually caused by a person’s childhood – that is, one or more events, or the general way the person was raised, directly created this (these) issue(s). I like the way my current counselor put it – this (type of) person has cracks in the foundation that develops in our childhood.

For me, there is pretty much only one major issue, and it stems from how I was raised. My issue is lack of parental approval. A lot of people struggle with this to varying degrees, but it generally becomes a deep issue in someone’s life when the parents failed to instill an underlying positive message of self-worth. A healthy message would go along the lines of, “You’re approved and have worth in being, not in doing.” In other words, someone’s self-worth shouldn’t be reliant on what they achieve, but just in the act of being a human being. Getting back to a person’s parents and the message they convey, there are two points to keep in mind. One, the overall, long-term, message conveyed can be different from the message conveyed in specific instances. Two, messages (especially from authority figures) can be conveyed through non-verbal means. In fact, most of everyday communication is non-verbal. And further, if our verbal and non-verbal communication oppose each other, the receiver tends to latch upon the non-verbal communication.

With those two points in mind, it’s easy to see how in my case (and many others), my parents ended up conveying an underlying negative message of self-worth and approval. I say my parents ended up because chances are that it was unintentional on their part. Also, there were times where they expressed a positive message, both verbally and non-verbally. Unfortunately, the negative messages stuck more to my child psyche – perhaps because they were more frequent, or they were the non-verbal messages whereas the verbal ones were the positive messages.

At any rate, this issue has made itself a presence in my life since about 2001, when I went away to university. For the first 5-6 years, and especially for the 4 years I was in university, I didn’t have much conscious awareness of what the issue was. I more felt it was there subconsciously and was very reactive as a result. (Picture having a physical wound but at first not knowing where; all you feel at first is the pain of it, and your response is what I would term reactionary.) From about 2002 onward, I did see about 4 other counselors before I went to the one I’m seeing now. However, I only saw them for short periods – from about a few weeks to about 4 months. I was also misdiagnosed as OCD, and in about 2006, through the help of one of the 4 counselors, realized that I was clinically depressed. In hindsight, I’ve been clinically depressed since about 2001/2002, although perhaps not continually. It has only been in the past 1.25 years, with the current counselor, that I’ve had a lot of conscious awareness about this issue – what it is, why I’m struggling with it, etc.

I had started this post with the intent to write about what came out of my last counseling session, which has been on my mind a lot. From that point of view, all of the above is preamble and background text, which is necessary. However, it’s late and I have to wake up in about 4.5 hours, so I’m going to end this post. I’ll try and write about what I actually wanted to write on soon.

DH