I'm wearing my guts on the outside

When you have to be blisteringly honest about yourself in a room full of people, it really brings home to you how fragile and vulnerable you feel. After our first session I experience the emotional hangover from hell, and want to cry the whole time. It's like I've been filled up with cement and can't think straight I am wearing a suit with my guts on the outside all raw and exposed. I think that everyone can see my crippled soul.  Immediately I feel resistant to the change, and I can sense my inner voice telling me to run away. I'm caught between a rock and a hard place. I have to go through the pain otherwise I will always have low self esteem and this will exacerbate my depression. I 've got to put myself through this for another 9 weeks. Its going to be grueling. If I don't do it I'll stay in that horrid place of feeling bad about myself the whole time. I've got to grin and bear it as I desperately want to be well. I tell you this now, ignorance is bliss.

Starting any sort of recovery is like taking the lid off of Pandora's box. Once its off you cannot put it back on, and although you know the gratification of wellness and inner peace is only a CBT course away, its like chewing razor blades. When the first session is over, no one can make eye contact and we almost crawl on our knees back to the car park.

I try to pull on my behavioural activation techniques to stop my mood being contaminated, and attempt to do some basic things that involve activity and concentration. It's a disaster and I go home to my bed and a family bag of revels. Next time I need to prepare myself and really dig in, armour up with my hard bitch outfit and begin anew. It dawns on me why they get you to do the CBT course "Over coming depression and learning behavioural activation" first. If you don't have those little strategies you would want to go home and possibly do something silly! I get a distinct feeling that a few people are going to drop out of this course.

Oh yes, and during this I'm tying to hold down a really grown up job and introduce the new more assertive, esteem filled me to my well balanced and unsuspecting colleagues, god bless them! What a nightmare!