Helpfulness of Therapy

 I’m seeing that therapist for the second time on Tuesday evening. I know it was my choice to go, but now I seem to be dreading it. I just don’t find it helpful after all. At the end of the session, she tried to teach me box breathing. I know all about breathing techniques, and in fact, there are several things you can do in the moment for panic attacks that are well known. A long time ago, I found an article 13 Things to do for a Panic Attack. 

In fact, if you google that, several more articles come up regurgitating the same tips and adding a couple additional tips here and there. When it comes to panic attacks, I feel like any therapist I see is just going to paraphrase those articles, give me the same tips, and nothing else. 

Also, I was not able to do my routine blood work yesterday because the order from teledoc still has my old last name on it. I changed my name at the dmv Monday. So I spent yesterday correcting that hassle. Now I have to go back to fedex office and print the order again. 

Regarding the 13 things to do for panic attacks- it’s not exactly that some of them “work” and some “don’t work”. It’s that they all work and don’t work at different times, depending on a million different things. I remember writing down for one therapist what “percentage of the time” each one worked, but the percentages fluctuate. That therapist just sat there and argued with me that they should work all the time, because “they are backed by science.”  I didn’t have the confidence at the time to tell her that in those scientific studies, at least some of the participants did state that it didn’t work. The findings are an overall thing. I shouldn’t have had to argue that to someone with a master’s degree. 

We’re having heavy storms today with flash flooding, so I can’t go to fedex until later today or tomorrow. Then hopefully I can do my fasting blood Monday and THEN I also have to go report my name change to the social security office. 

Everything seems like such a pain in the ass all of a sudden. 

Seed ball Garden Update 🪴 🌿

My seed ball mixtures of 3 kinds of squash, spinach, cilantro and catnip now look like this. 

My father in law fell about a month ago and since then hasn’t been himself. Because of this, we didn’t want to ask him if we could plant them in the ground. We live on his property in the guest house. So we bought this planter. I’m not sure how it will work but at least now we have it. It’s reusable. 

 

Quilt Rows

I went through two drawers full of blue and gray denim quilt blocks and pieced them together in rows of 7 blocks. I thought I could make a denim chenille quilt for my Etsy shop that consisted of 7 rows of 7 blocks (all of the previous ones were 6 rows of 6 blocks). I put the rows together, and I realized that I had two different shades of gray. The inconsistency gave me a bad case of the irritation. Here’s the before:

So I took some of them apart and took some of my remaining blocks apart just enough to fix it so it’s all the dark shade of gray. The end result is now only 6 rows of 7 blocks, but still a good size and the colors look more uniform. 

I thought back to my real estate class. It taught that if all houses in a sub division look the same, then the value increases. You may support someone’s right to choose to paint their own house purple, but the reality is that it will bring the value of the whole block or sub division down. That’s why those pesky HOA’s exist. I guess they’re a necessary evil, even though I really wish people could do as they wished with their own houses. Same went with this quilt. I have a better chance of selling it if the rows looked better. 

 

Therapy 👿😾👺

 This evening I had a therapy session. I would like to work through my fear of routine medical tests and the fear that something extremely catastrophic will happen just because I’m happy and in a good place now. I briefly described how I feel, what my goals are for therapy, and how I had extremely debilitating panic attacks for approximately ten years. The therapist had judgmental eyebrows. I don’t know how to describe it. She was knotting her eyebrows the whole time, and maybe she was concentrating. Otherwise, therapy was ok. She convinced me to go for my bloodwork. I’m off Friday and Monday, so I can go then- I just need to find out where to go. So I sent a general message on teledoc saying I looked on my order and can’t find where to go. They will answer in the morning. At least I hope. She gave me a breathing exercise. To me, breathing exercises don’t work well. I didn’t tell her that. I just let her think she was helping, because I feel like I’m going to need her at bay until I’m done getting all these tests. I need bloodwork, a Pap smear, a mammogram, and a colonoscopy. And even those aren’t going to ease my fears because what if I have a brain tumor?  They don’t screen yearly for that. 

I told her that I lost three cousins three years in a row in car accidents. Then two years after the last one, a friend of my mom died of pancreatic cancer and a year after that, the husband of another of her friends died of the same thing. Both of these people were health nuts!  The man ran marathons, and the woman was a yoga teacher. Anything can happen to anyone.  But this therapist said, that’s not a pattern. That was helpful. Catastrophic events do not happen in any kind of pattern, even if they seem to. 

Work is going ok. It’s slow, but still mildly steady. At the end of April we have a big ass busy spurt with a lot of overtime so I’m bracing myself. I found this picture online, and it reminds me of myself in my severe panic attack days  the woman in this painting also sort of looks like me when I was in my 30’s