World Mental Health Day, superheroes, me and REBT…
When I was working at Stonewall, each year, on World Mental Health day, members of staff would share stories about an experience they’d had or an obstacle they’d overcome relating to their mental health on our intranet platform.
I always found this incredibly powerful. Not to mention a massive relief, in terms of realising loads of people were going through or had gone through similar stuff to me. And even senior people! There was one person in particular who was very senior and always appeared to be so sorted, organised, professional and “together”. She was like some sort of superhero, who I could only aspire to be like when I (finally) grew up!
So in that vein, I thought I’d write my first ever blog here on Medium not about my new job as Delivery Lead at Citizens Advice (must stop saying “new” — this is week 8!) but about mental health, with the hope that sharing this story is helpful for someone else out there.
In January last year, I was six months into a new Head of Digital Projects role at Stonewall. I was dealing with some very challenging stakeholders (who else got pulled into random GDPR-hell-projects which didn’t really have much to do with their day job?!) and my anxiety was absolutely through the roof. At that point, I was putting it solely down to work but in reality (and retrospect), it also had a lot to do with the relationship I was in and how hard I was trying to make that work.
I had a lot of horrid physical symptoms going on — a heavy, knotted ball in the pit of my stomach and what felt like a big bubble of air, always there at the top of my throat. I’d sometimes wake up to find I’d been scratching my legs really hard in the middle of the night without knowing why, and every morning, it took every ounce of willpower I had to get up, get showered, get on the train and get into work.
One day a random email from a Meet-Up group I was part of hit my inbox, offering a low cost counselling service from one of its members. It said:
“I work with the model of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), which is a talking therapy focusing on the present, as well as unhelpful thoughts and behaviours. In a non-judgemental, open and safe environment, during our sessions I will work with you to identify any unhelpful thinking and how it affects your behaviour. These unhelpful thinking patterns will be challenged and helpful alternatives will be put into practise so that problems can be overcome.”
I’d heard and read a little bit about CBT — or cognitive behavioural therapy — which REBT is a form of, and I’d already thought it might be something which I’d like and find useful.
I still hesitated to go ahead and reply to the email though, questioning whether things were “bad enough”, if I “deserved’ to take up that space and time which could go to someone else more in need and lots of other self-doubting thoughts and worries.
In the end, I did bite the bullet because in the back of my mind, I was scared if I didn’t deal with what was going on when it was at that level, it would only get worse and would be even harder for me to regain some sort of balance and feel more in control again.
For five months until June, I saw my counsellor once a week on a Monday. Being a goodie-two shoes, who never got a detention in secondary school and who was (and still is!) always looking for that ‘pat on the head’, the fact that this particular type of counselling is very structured and formulaic really appealed to me. The homework, print-outs, diagrams and exercises really fitted well with my personality and general approach to things.
I might have worked in ‘digital stuff’ for the last eight years or so, but I still really love a notepad and pen and being able to hold something tangible in my hand, which I can see, touch and even smell (fresh clean pages in a notepad are just the best — am I right?).
I was worried that having a dedicated space to just talk about me once a week would feel self-indulgent and narcissistic, and I did struggle with those feelings and I was constantly comparing what seemed like my ridiculously small issues to ‘real’ problems that other people were facing.
But it also gave me time which I didn’t get elsewhere or at any other point in the week to examine why I was where I was, how I was relating to and communicating with other people and how I could overcome at least some of the physical symptoms I was experiencing.
I also found it super weird not to really ask my counsellor how she was doing, what she’d been up to, what worries she was dealing with and what her favourite dinner was. Well, no, not her fave dinner, but I found it odd to have such a one-way interaction with someone, who didn’t need anything from me whatsoever and I felt rude not knowing or asking anything about her or her life.
Obviously that’s not the dynamic of this particular type of relationship but it definitely took me a while to get my head round the fact that it could just be ‘all about me’ and I didn’t need to dedicate more than a couple of those 50 minutes asking about her.
Once I’d processed that, I basically took to REBT like a duck to water. So much so that I didn’t even notice my counsellor was heavily pregnant by the time we got to June, and that she would need to finish our sessions slightly earlier, to go off and have her baby! I’ll try to claim, in my defence, that I was busy trying to maintain eye contact with her and taking lots of notes… and also that she had a whole range of delightful scarves and long linen jacket-type things which covered her bump a lot of the time (ahem!) but ultimately I guess it can be seen as a positive that I was concentrating so much on making the most of the time.
My counsellor’s maternity leave did mean that I didn’t quite get to the ‘integration’ part of my REBT — where you work to build everything you’ve been learning and putting into practice into your everyday life.
However, she recommended a book — Reason To Change by Windy Dryden — for me to continue on my own and strengthen the helpful beliefs I’d worked hard to start having, to replace my old irrational and negative thought patterns and responses. Predictably (!), I wasn’t as dedicated once I didn’t have someone to answer to or report back to.
Starting a new job and going through a big change has bought a few of those anxious feelings back and I’ve been meaning to sit down with a nice fresh notepad, a pleasing pen and a clear mind, and get back into regularly writing a journal and doing some of the exercises I was doing before.
Writing this blog and marking World Mental Health day has given me the nudge I needed to start it up again and make sure I stay on track.
It’s also reminded me not to try to be a superhero and that plain old day-to-day Jo can be pretty good too…
Please feel free to message me or send an email if you’d like to share your experiences or even just have a chat — always happy to hear from people 😃
