I have learnt a great deal about myself since I started the Postnatal wellbeing group 8 weeks ago. Well actually I knew all of it already but my perspective has altered.
I have always been timid, easily embarrassed and easily upset. I take every little thing to heart, I am a sensitive soul. But I keep it all bottled up, so no one ever realises they did or said anything to upset me. However on the inside I have blown this feeling up into something massive, yet on the outside I'm pretending all is fine, perhaps so as to save their feelings.
Within the group we have been introduced formally to our unhelpful thinking habits. Unhelpful thinking habits, it seems, appear in many fashions but there are 4 in particular that ring true, that I can relate to, namely "mind-reading", "critical self", "catastrophising" and "shoulds and musts".
"Shoulds and musts"
I have always been an organised person, I love a good list but since having my son almost 16 months ago I have found that I cannot achieve all my list tasks in my unrealistic time frames and that is so frustrating. What was a days list, takes a week or more and makes me feel like I am failing. The fact that I feel this way feeds into my thoughts of being a failing mother. 'Why can't I achieve it all?' 'The house is always a mess' or 'yet another quick meal' but everyone else manages'. But in reality, I have always had high expectations of myself, too high, like I am setting myself up to fail before I have even started and this just adds unnecessary pressure onto my own shoulders. I am my own worst enemy. I need to be more realistic and not get stressed out that my list hasn't been tackled that day. In reality there isn't a time limit so why am I setting one? I need to acknowledge when I have achieved a task and reward myself, not beat myself up for all the tasks I haven't completed.
Critical self
I have always put myself down, blaming myself for things that go wrong, and not acknowledging those events or achievements I should be proud of. Everything is always "my fault" because I am "useless" and others must see this.
Today we discussed our "poisoned parrots". That is a parrot who negatively commentates our lives. The point was, how long would we put up with this bird before we put a towel over its cage or got rid of it and yet it is how I am thinking about myself all the time. I am my own internal bully and I do a great job of causing my own upset. One of my problems is confidence. I need to believe I am, for example, good at my job or a good mother, otherwise this voice will continue. But I need to learn to ignore the poisoned parrot, I would be much happier and have more self esteem if I did.
Catastrophising
I am a pro at this. An example I have given previously is my fear of parking my car. It starts with, what if there are no parking spaces? To what if there is a space but it's tight? And leads to a magnified, imagined, scenario where I am half in a space, failing to park, with the whole town watching me wreck my car and cry hysterically at the wheel and end up parking my crumpled car miles away and walking in the torrential storm.
But this is just in my head, made up what ifs that are brilliant in feeding into my anxiety. To others I look rude because I turn down an offer to meet in town but I have created this overwhelming fear from zero factual evidence.
It is obviously noticeable to others at times though. My car was in for a service and I needed to get the bus to work via my son's nursery. A simple enough task but the night before I was already worrying that there wouldnt be space for a pram on the bus and I would not be allowed on. My other half could tell I was worrying about it but kept quiet. At the end of the day he arrived home and asked how the bus commute went. It had gone well, which is what I fed back, and he replied with, 'So there was space on the bus for you both? You weren't kicked off? People didn't chant at you 'Get off, get off'? The bus driver didn't pull away with you stuck in the doors? You didn't look down and notice you were wearing your slippers and had forgetten to put your clothes on and realise whilst on the bus that you were bottom half naked?' He is a sarcastic arse but I laughed because it was a true, albeit exaggerated version, of my thought process too often.
Mind-reading
This is arguably my most unhelpful thinking habit. Assuming that I know what others are thinking with minimal, if any, evidence for it. And my assumption is often a negative.
So prime recent examples include the reason why I didn't tell anybody other than my mum and partner about my diagnosis of PND. I am very close to my cousin, she had a baby not long before I did and her baby had a lot of health problems initially and my cousin too suffers from PND. I didn't want to tell my cousin about my diagnosis because I had already decided that she would think 'you have no reason for having PND, I have had it much harder than you have'. I had decided that she would feel, in comparison to her, I had much less to deal with and therefore her PND was valid and mine wasn't. Reflecting on this, these are my own thoughts and in reality when she found out she was supportive. The same is true of one of my closest friends, she may not be able to have children, so I didn't want to tell her about my diagnosis because I assumed her thought would be 'how can you be depressed, you have what I really want but can't have? '. And the truth is, situation reversed in any example I could give, I would never think these thoughts about someone else so why do I believe this is how they wold think about me? Both have been fab and not at all as I had envisaged.
I have noted that I am making these negative speculations unhealthily frequently, these thoughts are like the poisoned parrot talking to me but mimicking my friends, relatives or strangers voice. Perhaps the answer is to use imagery and shoot that bloody parrot or perhaps more sensibly, to make no assumptions when there is diddly-squat evidence.
When I started the Postnatal wellbeing group 8 weeks ago I really wasn't optimistic I would get much from it. I have been this shy, anxious, confidence lacking, useless person (in my opinion, I now reflect this is not all fact) since I was much younger, so how is a 10 weeks course going to change my whole temperament? The fact is, it is not but it has already altered my awareness of my thoughts and feeling and associated behaviour and in turn that has allowed me to challenge my thoughts based on my feelings and modify my behaviour positively. I am noticing the valuable boost in mood, I have met some lovely ladies and have a weekly fix of NHS custard creams. I am enjoying every minute.
