Gaining More Awareness of Thoughts and Self-Talk.

Today, I am doing the journal entry on page 14 from The Balanced Mind -A Mental Health Journal- Exploratory Prompts and Effective Practices by Carolyn Mehlomakulu, LMFT-S, ATR-BC. Money is one of those issues that my OCD grabs onto, and I just perseverate. It’s a nightmare, honestly. Nothing helpful results from it, no solutions, and it is quite likely I will do something to make the issue worse instead of better. This is a regular and current pattern. We just had a tire go, we knew we needed new tires soon, but the car could not wait long enough. We ended up needing four new tires ASAP, costing us over $400 that we just don’t have. Now we have those payments on top of what we already have. I am still applying for disability, but I had to start doing some gig work to make money. It won’t be enough to mess up the SSDI application, but it will help and that is all I can think about. I have decided to do Monday-Friday around my husband’s schedule. I enjoy the gig work, it feels less stressful because I have minimal interaction and do not have to stand around be verbally abused. For once in my life I can just walk away and close out their order.

My self-talk is terrifying if I am honest. Meditation is helping, but my brain latches onto something, and it is all I think about. My self-talk goes straight to me being worthless. The struggle with OCD, Bipolar Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, and PTSD becomes quite apparent in my self-talk. I berate myself, debate ways to punish myself, and when things are bad my self-talk revolves around the best way to just end things painlessly. I realize suicide solves nothing, but I’m not rational when I am in those thoughts. My self-talk has improved with meditation, but I still catch negative self-talk daily. It is never my intention to berate myself, but that is what generally happens. I am working to change this, it is just going to take time. I was just telling my husband that I believe yoga and meditation help me deal with and live life despite my anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and OCD. Learning to rewrite these thoughts and therefore my self-talk is a challenge that meditation and yoga are helping me do. Just like twelve-step programs, I just have to take it one day at a time, one moment at a time, and one thought at a time. I cannot, nor should I, expect overnight change. Rather, I want to see slow progression that I can sustain.