More updatage

I can't believe how disjointed last night's entry was. Serves me right for trying to talk on Y!M, update my LJ and write three separate posts for Reparo all at the same time.

Had lunch/coffee with ipanicked yesterday, which was a lot of fun. We both came to the realisation that: 1) we're both royal procrastinators and holders of good intentions that never lead anywhere, and 2) that this was the first time we'd ever seen each other in a non-gaming setting other than his wedding last summer. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's the last time I saw him before yesterday. It was long overdue, and I had a really good time. Funny how I discovered we had a lot more in common than I had previously imagined. I guess it's because we'd never really had a good conversation (just the two of us) before this.

Always good to discover nice things about your friends years after you've met them. We also both agreed that blackbuffet needs to run his "Forgotten Realms Redux" one-off soon. :)

On that note: blackbuffet!!!! Yes, you! After MONTHS of not updating your LJ, how DARE you taunt me by posting SPORTS PREDICTIONS?!?!?! I want DETAILS, dammit! Tell us what's going on! ;)

Otherwise, I saw James Bond again with my parents. I was not overly thrilled with that particular birthday present, as I don' have the greatest associations with that movie now, but they both wanted to see it, and as it made them happy I didn't insist on seeing The Two Towers over again. I'll save that for another time. My mother bought me pajamas for my birthday, which was nice (they were very pretty) but sadly they were too small.

My father also gave me his old copy of The Four Seasons, as he'd got himself a boxed set of Vivaldi by exchanging the Christmas present I got for him (a copy of "Giant" because he's a fan of James Dean).

Then we had chocolate truffles and champagne, and then I went home (I only had one glass of champagne because I was driving, don't worry).

And there you have how I spent my birthday.

In other news, I got to work today and pulled out my schedule, only to see an odd abbreviation next to my working hours: "PVAC." So I thought to myself: "That's odd. Isn't that the abbreviation they use for 'paid vacation'?"

I called up the scheduling department, and sure enough, they informed me I was on vacation this week. They just hadn't seen fit to tell me beforehand that my request for vacation time had been approved TWO MONTHS AGO!!!!

Normally, when you request vacation time, they tell you when it's approved. If your request is refused, you never hear back from them. This apparently saves them time and energy. However, someone dropped the ball bigtime on this one, and if I hadn't called to check I'd probably still be working now instead of sipping coffee at my mother's apartment and making plans to have lunch with firewillow.

So this week I will be going into fully fledged Martha Stewart Avenger Mode™ and scour my apartment to within an inch of its life. Among the things I wish to accomplish:

1- Organise my bookcase
2- Give the bathroom a thorough washing
3- Finish all the unwashed dishes
4- Do ALL my laundry

If those four things get done, I will consider my week a success on the domestic front. :)

I also have to pop by the post office today, and I think I'll pay a visit to Mélange Magique to pick up some stuff with which to make my week more pleasant and relaxing. I may also cave in and get my hair cut. I am still hesitating between getting it cut quite short (the way I had it from the age of about one until I was seventeen) or just getting the same trim I've been getting for the past seven years.

I kind of feel like doing something radical and funky-ish with it, but I don't know if I have the courage to regrow it if I decide I prefer my hair long. *wibble*

*waves a CBT flag around happily*

CBT, before you ask, is the acronym for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, developed by David D. Burns. I have vaunted its merits in this space before, but never really in detail. Since I have a number of new friends on my list of late who have struggled or are struggling with depression (and other mental illnesses), I thought I'd spread the joy.

So here's a copy of the post I made earlier to Bodies Under Siege, the self-injury posting board I moderate along with Deb Martinson and several others.

This Public Service Announcement has been brought to by the letters C, T, and the number 5. ;)

A lot of you may have noticed that when Deb and the rest of us monitors answer posts, we often try to reframe the situation or ask "helpful" questions and make suggestions about how to feel better.

Well, in the same spirit I'd like to share a little bit of information I gathered over the course of time, which will eventually (if people find it useful) go into the Sourcebook area.

I thought I'd start with 10 Basic Cognitive Distortions that can contribute significantly to making depression worse. Or, put another way, 10 ways of thinking that make us feel like crap. ;)

I'm going to be quoting almost word-for-word from a book by David Burns called "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy." This is the second edition of the book, which has been out since the eighties, and outlines the precepts of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (a therapy he came up with and developed with other psychiatrists and psychologists over the past years).

Since this therapy helped me so much, I figure it can't hurt to pass on some of the information. :)


Definitions of Cognitive Distortions:

1- ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2- OVERGENERALISATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. (i.e. You drop a cup and break it and say to yourself: "That's typical! I'm always breaking stuff!" when in fact you haven't broken a dish in years)

3- MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colours the entire beaker of water.

4- DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5- JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

a) Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out.
b) ]The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

6- MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."

7- EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are. "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

8- SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements at others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9- LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behaviour rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "He's a goddamn louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured and emotionally loaded.

10- PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for. (i.e. a loved one's bad mood, a tragic loss, an argument between other people)



I hope everyone finds this useful. It helped me a lot to figure out what was going wrong in my thinking, in any case. :D

Gah! O_O

Came home with the intention of relaxing and doing some Reparo-type stuff, and instead spent better part of the evening talking a girl from BUS down from crisis.

I'm so not trained for crisis intervention, it's not even funny. I was quietly moderating the board along with Joyce, another moderator, when we both simultaneously came across a long series of posts by a poster named Cath.

( Details behind here, but they're depressing and gory and you may want to steer clear if you're at all triggered by self-injury, talk of suicide, etc. )

So here I am with Joyce trying to make sure that Cath doesn't actually commit suicide during the night. Seven hours until her appointment with her student counsellor, and we seem to have made some headway. She went to bed a few minutes ago, and promised us she would wait and talk to the counsellor.

I'm glad that she's all right for now, but every time something like this happens it just breaks my heart even more. I live a whole freaking ocean away, and all I want to do is take that frightened little girl in my arms and and stroke her hair and tell her it's okay, that one of those psychiatrists *will* take her seriously when she says she's afraid people are poisoning her food and that the jars of peanuts in her house talk to her. I want her to believe that someone out there will believe her when she says she's being abused and help her. Even if she's lying (and I don't think she is) it *still* means she needs help! I don't understand why the mental health professionals who are treating her don't get it.

I'm tired now.