Day 201: Conversations and role play

It has been a couple of months since a last posted anything about my trips to the psychologist. Mostly because I felt that there wasn't any real progress and partly because I was feeling a little guilty for not doing my homework. By homework, I mean the mood chart. I was to choose an emotion (anxiety, stress, etc) and for each hour of the day, mark out of ten, how I felt, 1 being not depressed, 10 bordering on suicidal. For some reason I just couldn't bring myself to complete even one day of the chart, let alone one week.

The lack of progress centred around the fact that all our conversations appeared very one way, with my psychologist asking relatively short questions followed by me giving long, detailed answers. Quite often I would reach what I thought was the end of my answer only to find my psychologist looking at me expectantly, waiting to see what else I have to say.




It's quite an unusual position to find myself in considering that most people I talk to have always got something to say. Having someone actually listen to me without them thinking about what they're going to say next isn't something that happens every day. For me it occurs for one hour, once a week, excluding bank holidays, sickness and acts of God.

Speaking of acting, the point of this post was to reveal how something different had happened during our most recent session together. We did some role play. The purpose of this was to put me in a situation where I might find myself getting angry. It worked quite well in that even though I didn't lose my temper, I did begin to feel uncomfortable. My psychologist had asked me to let her know if I started getting worked up during the exercise. I guess she didn't want me losing my rag and trashing her office. Can't say I blame her, I wouldn't be too keen either.