Depression and negative affirmations

[passingthrough]

Hi all,

I'm not sure how to use this forum to get help, and feel that I have nothing to offer fellow participants, but I need to try something at this time. 

I'm 34M, probably somewhat autistic (but undiagnosed) and been struggling with what I roughly call depression. I'm currently taking SNRI antidepressants and attending therapy. Other than that it's hard to say what's going on with any clarity.

I regularly tell myself these things, usually in threes and always including the last two:

“I can’t do anything right”
“I can’t do it”

"I can't do anything"
“I hate myself”
“I’m a loser”
“I deserve to die”

I believe that this is causing me to feel worse, and creates negative feedback loops. I just want to know if anyone has any suggestions for how to either stop or ignore this behaviour. I've tried contradicting it ("I'm doing my best, and I deserve to be happy") and tried logically dismantling it ("Loser? I didn't realise this was a competition", "Deserve to die? Everyone dies!") but so far nothing has really worked. It's mainly triggered by rejection or criticism, either by my partner or me, for example criticism of my work performance or behaviour.  I've talked to my therapist about it, but we haven't really discussed any strategies. 

I'm happy to read other threads, just don't know where to start. Thanks.

[passingthrough]

Hi yggdrasil and thanks for your message, I think I'm a bit overwhelmed to have got multiple responses, so sorry for not replying sooner.

Thanks for your support and suggestions, I read them a couple of times over the weekend and thought about it, so I might write them out here. I'm not writing much in my journal at the moment so maybe this will help.

1. I feel like I have a fairly stable routine but it doesn't incorporate anything that could really lift me up and make me feel better. I feel like I'm stuck in it.
2. I think I did do some schema therapy in either 2016 or 2017, I can't remember too much from it, there was definitely some worksheets about child and adult (or maybe parent?) modes. I think I might have had a strong dose of "detached self soother" or words to that effect.
3. The idea of me skateboarding is hilarious, I'm too old, tall, heavy and self conscious. I should probably try and get a bike though. The challenge with physical activity the last few years has been to find something that I want to do that won't aggravate some injury. Actually this comment made me think I should play tetris again, I like the sense that you simply have to keep putting blocks in holes, and when it's fast enough 2 bad moves is usually enough to kill you, or at least end me, so you can't think of anything else.
4. I'm not sure how to approach this one, I've never really understood spirituality. I guess sport is possibly as close as it could get?
5. I really think I am trying with this, I'm always trying to write lists of painfully simple tasks to tick off - today I had "take the bins out" for example - the trouble is when you only have one or two tasks down and you do nothing then that page has no achievements on it forever.  I do keep coming back to it though. I've realised that I think in sentences, so it helps to write things down, I find that I sometimes worry less or can move on from things after they're written down.

Sorry for the unnecessary tangents, and thanks for giving me some things to think about.

[Eagle Ray]

Thank you kindly passingthrough. In terms of anything you’ve experienced,  trauma may not be the right word. I just used the small t trauma example as it gets talked about quite often now, but perhaps something like learned patterns or adaptations may be in there.

I just mentioned the shame as it was what I thought of after reading the statements from your inner critic. I know sometimes a trait that is described in some people with autism is alexithymia which refers to finding it hard to find language for emotions. So maybe you experience the statement about yourself without naming the emotion? I read a book by Donna Williams (later known as Polly Samuel) that I really liked called Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct. She had autism herself (she died in 2017). I prefer her take on autistic processing which is more nuanced. She talks about people with autism staying closer to sensory understandings of the world versus more interpretive understandings and ego-based understandings which may develop later - of the world as a series of feelings and sense perceptions first that isn’t always describable for the person in words, or only with some delay. Certainly my world has been like this. So it’s taken me many years to identify and name emotions in myself in a conscious sense, often with a lot of dissociation going on. I’m not sure I’m explaining this well (tired brain). But I do feel autistic processing is different and so making sense of things like depression is more complex than just labelling it as that. I like the way you referred to it in your original post as “what I roughly call depression”. I can really relate to this description as things often feel more amorphous to me than the distinction of labels and categories. If you look up The System of Sensing by Donna Williams on YouTube you may find it interesting. The video was made when she was going through chemo with terminal cancer. She was just an amazing person, so lucid and positive given her situation. I was fortunate to do 3 counselling sessions with her shortly before this time. I got infinitely further with her than I did with the psych I’d been trying to work with at the time. She read me clearly when the psych couldn’t see me at all and she was living autism from the inside out, so her understandings are deeply insightful. She also picked complex trauma as my primary developmental issue but that autistic traits were mixed in with it. I fortunately found a really good psych in 2022 who has helped me massively with the complex trauma side, but this has also helped me in terms of self-acceptance in terms of autistic and adhd traits.

Sorry, I’m rambling somewhat, but thought I’d just share those perspectives in case they help. Donna Williams (aka Polly Samuel) also points to strengths in autistic processing. She sees that everyone starts off somewhat similar with this prototypical processing style but autistic people tend to hold it for longer, especially as neurons in the autistic brain don’t get pruned in the way they do in others, so all these extra connections are going on. It’s actually fascinating and helps me to understand my somewhat chaotic-feeling brain.

I’m glad if you’re feeling a bit more understood. I know the stuck feeling very well. I do feel I’m starting to unstick though so I hope I can give some encouragement that that is possible.

Best wishes,

ER

[passingthrough]

Hi Eagle Ray, thanks for that last message and sorry for the delayed reply - I meant to write a response in a day or two, and then days turned to weeks and it was a new year and so on. There was a couple of things you brought up that I wanted to comment on. 

Thank you for the recommended reading, I can't promise that I will actually read or watch any of their work, but I already have many hours of podcasts I've been meaning to listen to for ages, so I won't make promises that I might not keep. I also have a bit of an aversion to watching youtube videos about Autism for reasons that I don't quite understand. 

Your comment about experiencing and understanding emotions is something that is not new to me, I remember the therapist I was talking to in 2016 saying something similar. She recommended a Brene Brown audiobook that's basically about shame (I haven't read much else by her but I think it's a topic she's gone back to many times). I feel that I know that shame is the main thing that I struggle with, and I feel I have an understanding of it, but it's not an emotional understanding. I understand it as being the feeling that I am a bad or defective person. In that book it's introduced as a counterpart to guilt: Guilt comes from doing bad, Shame comes from being bad. But I don't know what it's meant to actually feel like.

More generally it seems that there is a gap in the way I react to stress. It's something like: 

Stressful stimuli -> Feel "bad" -> Some maladaptive coping (eating, avoidance, sex, telling myself I'm a loser until I fall asleep).

I could say at the time when I'm in the middle bit (if anyone actually asked) that I felt bad, but I don't know if I'm actually feeling anything at all, and I can't name any further details or why. I don't know if this is because I'm depressed, or because my brain is different or if I don't let myself feel anything for some reason.

Also, for what it's worth when I made that comment about "what I roughly call depression” I was meaning that it's not a term my current doctor or anyone I've seen in the last year has told me. But also as you say I don't strongly or clearly identify with it, but I have to call it something and that something is depression.

All the best. 

[Eagle Ray]

Hi passingthrough,

Yes, please don't feel any obligation to read or watch those things. It's just where my mind went based on what you were talking about. I think the best resources are often the ones we find ourselves that resonate with us. There are so many videos now on autism it's almost overwhelming. I think I know what you mean about something feeling uncomfortable without being able to clearly discern why. I get that feeling myself in relation to certain things sometimes.

That's interesting about shame and intellectually recognising/understanding it but not exactly emotionally feeling it. I think I can emotionally feel it but was also dissociated from it for many years, so it was always there but I couldn't put it into words, if that makes any sense? For me it is a kind of gut-wrenching, sickening, painful inner collapse. I experience it as a contraction in my body where I almost want to curl up in a ball. So it is quite toxic really. I countered it growing up by developing a relentlessly positive persona which was also a survival response to my family environment. Yet underneath I really wasn't ok.

I don't know the best way of how to try to connect with it emotionally for you. What you describe does sound like what gets called alexithymia. My psychologist will ask where I feel something in my body or what is happening in my body. Sometimes I can't answer her but I'm slowly getting better at it and I can sense where there are constrictions. I'm starting to detect the links between certain emotions and bodily responses. So I don't know but maybe some kind of somatic awareness work may help. Obviously we are often guarded against shame because we don't want to feel it, but I have learned that allowing myself to feel in the presence of a compassionate other is often what allows the feeling to release and the nervous system to recalibrate.

I don't know the answer to why it's hard for you to explain further why you feel bad when you do. It could be one or all of the reasons you mention. I think a huge amount of our responses are reflexive/implicit rather than conscious/explicit, so whatever is happening may have its own internal logic for your nervous system. I've learned our nervous system does things for a reason and is always trying to take care of us, and a lot of this is going on outside our conscious awareness. Also, if dissociation is present, we can be doing certain things without really knowing why. For me I am finding that gradually working through things with somatic awareness is the only way I've been able to really understand and work through these processes with my psychologist. It's like a gradual waking up to things I've been dissociated from.

I understand what you're saying about the term depression. It's quite a diffuse word. I think clinical depression is usually demarcated by things like loss of enjoyment of activities that you once enjoyed and strong shutdown and withdrawal from the world. I'm actually experiencing some depression at the moment which is hormonally driven and involves frequently wanting to collapse and burst into tears. But I think we can also be sort of generally dissociated which could be called depression or not. Again, the only suggestion I can think of is bringing somatic awareness to feelings, as I think it's often those amorphous, nameless feelings that are affecting us but if we can start to delineate them a bit we can begin to work through stuff in our nervous system.

Not sure if that ramble is helpful. But I hope things get easier in time and you can begin to make more and more sense of things. Not that things have to make sense exactly but just having a sense generally of what our nervous system is doing can be helpful. It may allow you to be more present with how you respond to stressful stimuli too. I find I still have my automated responses to stressful stimuli, but then my conscious mind now catches up with what's happening and can step in more. So, for example, my inner critic might start attacking me but I quickly subdue it and replace it with kindness instead.

Best wishes,

ER

[quirkywords]

Passing through

thanks for your honest posts and encouraging  the discussion with ER and the rising and everyone who has contributed . I have learnt a lot  from everyone.