Old tapes

In DBT tonight, I talked some about my little situation yesterday to help make some sense of a rather chaotic situation. Why is it that someone with a year's worth of therapeutic training--nine month's of which intensive skills-based training--falls back into these old behaviors so quickly without notice? (Editor's Note: One of the girls in the group was curious how it was even possible to get the tapes to ever stop, so there's my perspective.) To be honest, if one of the other group members hadn't spoken up about her disbelief in the tapes ever going away, I wouldn't have begun to make sense of any of it.

It's not that my skills don't work, or that I didn't learn anything. I most certainly did, because in situations A, B, and C, I used them and the new, healthy tapes played, leaving the old, unhealthy ones to rot. This situation is a hole in my system of skill-based scenarios. Clearly, I haven't found the right set of coping skills and the healthy tape to play when I think about my support circle or treatment team is abandoning me. That spelled out in black and white sounds much easier to handle than the chaos of last night's entry, doesn't it?

But that leaves me with the aftermath. It's all well and good on paper that I have to just reason my way through to a more wise-minded understanding of how my support circle is not abandoning me; HIPPA has its rules and I never should have been led to believe that I could come back for that. However, be that as it may, I still have these old tapes playing now, playing loud and messing with my every move and attempting to dictate my every action. "You're fat. Eat this, or nothing at all." "You're gross. See this? Or this? Or this?" "You're inadequate. You could've finished faster at that. You could've done without that. You shouldn't have smiled so much." Very loud. The tools I use to fight them are working some, but not much. I'm going to try some more self-care things tomorrow and see how it goes. I did a lot of stuff today, though, and it didn't seem to workout. Group suggested that I box off the old tapes and set them aside. I'm not sure I know how to put a shouting voice into a box and expect not to hear it anymore...

The rest of my day was actually very good. Work was great. I finished my first project and started a new one, which I will finish promptly in the morning and will expect a new project. Yay. I went to my first departmental meeting, too. I'm coming to realize just how relaxed this department is. I dig it. Writing about work cheers me up immediately. I think it's because the atmosphere and the people there are so awesome that it's really hard for me to shake off the positivity from it. One of the skills I use to combat those tapes is thinking about work, even though a lot of the inadequacy thoughts stem from that (i.e. you're not good enough at x, y, z...)