Somewhere in the dark morass of my lowest points last year, I reached for a hold of sanity that has been invaluable throughout this year of recovery, David D. Burns's workbook for cognitive behavioral therapy. It has an unfortunate title, in three inch tall letters, no less. One that I cannot proudly display on the subway. Here it is:
TEN DAYS TO SELF-ESTEEM.
The title aside, this workbook has been a great help to me. Dr. Burns is the psychiatrist who popularized CBT in the 1980's with his book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. In a nutshell, CBT helps one to find, name, and reframe the distorted thinking that is at the core of a depressed mood and depressive (sometimes suicidal) thinking.
It's a write-all-over-it kind of workbook, with charts, checklists, and inventories as you progress through the steps. While my work with my therapist is not on a strict CBT regimen, I would share my work with her and get her validation and insight on my distorted thoughts. Even though I have only worked through about 3/4 of the book in the last year, I can see the progress that it has helped me to make.
In the beginning, in my suicidal panic, I was having horrible difficulties dealing with people. I learned to grab a pen and work through my thinking before saying and doing things that would bring on regret and shame and only make me feel worse. It was miraculous how feelings of intense anger could disappear in a few minutes of scribbling down my thoughts.
More recently, I used the workbook to do some deep work on how I feel like I am a failure because I didn't finish my master's degree. (Mental breakdown was the cause.) The workbook helped me see how it is my own distorted thinking that is punishing me and holding me back from moving ahead. I didn't feel that miraculous lift from the feelings of self-blaming that I did from the earlier work, but over the last few weeks, I have felt my thoughts and feelings shifting closer to self-compassion and understanding. Not all there yet, but making progress.
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