Good work!
I need to look into aerobics for endorphins. Now I'm only doing heavy weightlifting. Cutting down on stuff here, from how you worded it, looks like it'd be beneficial for me to do that too. I like picking up these suggestions.
Can you describe what (how) you do with psychodynamic therapy?
Thanks - yeah endorphins are pretty amazing - I only recently discovered them. I always thought I was getting enough exercise but I really was just edging up against the aerobic regime - the heart rate monitor really helps show you where it's at. And if you stay in it for 5-10 minutes you get endorphins, which then give you dopamine. And then I finally had enough drive to tackle organizing some of the stuff that I've been putting off.
And yeah, I'm trying to get down to just one room worth of stuff, so I can move around easier - I like being more mobile.
I went through CBT when I was younger which was really helpful to get past a lot of anxiety, but psychodynamic deals with things like repression of emotions, learning to uncover them and integrate them into your psyche. Which in my case I think contributed to SA, because I repressed them so much, it led to weird interactions with people. Eg even getting past the anxiety, I still had problems with close relationships - I felt like I had nothing inside of me.
The book on journaling (which is research-based) talks about this stuff also - it sounds like a really cheap form of psychotherapy - the idea is to deal with things that were really troubling in your life, that you tend to avoid thinking about. Otherwise they remain unprocessed and unintegrated, and similar situations can trigger the repression. It fits with the whole idea of 'the talking cure' - by talking about your problems, you express the emotions and integrate them by thinking about them and processing them. And apparently, doing it in a journal can help also. But the therapist can also tell when you're tensing up and repressing some emotion, and try to get you to relax and talk about it (muscular tension is often a sign of repression). So I think it will eventually help me be able to get along with people better. And being able to experience some of the buried emotions has been pretty eye-opening in itself.
