Placebos

I've decided this week is the week I'll be trying out all the local CODA meetings to see if one of them is a good fit for me. They're all scheduled for much later in the week though so I've got time to burn and I thought I'd start out by checking out some of the more entry-level resources that people on the Codependency board mentioned. 

I'm a young person who was ruined by technology so I'm very, very bad at focusing on a singular task at a time. This has made listening to videos while doing things like knitting, tidying my room, planning out my week with meal plans (to make sure I eat because I can't waste the food), and so on really accessible to me. I think I'd like to graduate to reading something, which would require more of my focus and also specifically my hands, which I prefer to keep busy, but, I want to build up more of a surface level understanding with the content I'll be working with first. I feel like if I try to dive deep into a self-help book right now, it would be too easy for me to put it down and set it aside with excuses like, "I'm too busy to focus on this" or "this book just isn't keeping my attention right now, I should try again later when I'm in a better headspace" except the whole joke is that I'll never be in a better headspace.

I learned about the placebo effect at a very young age and that instilled this overly wary suspicion in me for all things until the end of time-- but especially any kind of medication for either your body or your mind. Specifically, it made me worried that if your body could be tricked into fixing itself because you think the sugar pill you just swallowed would solve all your problems, then your body could also be tricked into not doing shit because you think the actual medicine you just swallowed won't do anything either. Learning about placebos made me hyperaware of placebos and so I couldn't help but wonder every time I took an advil for period cramps, "what if this is just a placebo? and the only thing that's going to stop me from continuing to feel this blood-curdling pain is my faith", except my wondering this clearly calls into question this faith which means either the placebo won't work or I'll cause some kind of reverse-placebo effect and now the actual drug won't work-- either way, I'm stuck curled up on the floor of my bathroom in front of the toilet, alternating between spitting acid and what little remains in my stomach into the bowl and clutching my gut. My solution to this was to stop thinking about it. Focus on something else and drown out my Schrodinger's placebo fallacy. 

Unfortunately, this same mindset has followed me into all my forays with mental health too. The psychology degree isn't exactly helping either. It almost feels like I'm a stage magician who knows all the tricks and so I don't get to enjoy the shows in Vegas like everyone else does. Sure, I can admire the charisma and technique of my fellow magician but I don't get to experience the wonder of, "how did he do that?" This isn't to say that patients are ignorant of what processes they're working on or going through. Hell, I should theoretically be more optimistic than most since I've seen all the case studies for the amazing things the brain can do and, specifically, recover from. You can lose half your brain to a tragic ice cream-scooping incident and still function like a pretty normal person so long as a few specific areas are still intact. It's specifically my placebo worries. It's that I know all the "ingredients" involved in these processes and faith is a big one. Faith is also something I clearly struggle with, re:placebo. This time instead of Schroedinger's Placebo, we're working with an Inception of placebos. In this case, I have problems with faith characterized by my struggles with placebos, and in the metaphorical drug, or literal treatment, that is counseling, I know it isn't just a sugar pill because I've seen the ingredients at work except, oh no, one of those big ingredients is faith and technically that means that, in a purely technical sense, therapy and the like could also be considered placebos because they're all about you doing the work yourself with a little guidance from a therapist/pill and, as previously mentioned, I kind of have a problem with placebos because I'm hyperaware of them even when I don't actually think the advil I'm swallowing down is a placebo and so, when I know my treatment is, indeed, a placebo-- can I still put my faith in it? Even when I so desperately want to?

All of that is to say-- this is why I'm starting with videos. I'm easing myself into the material so I can build faith in it. I'm worried if I open up a book and it starts out with anything a little too metaphysical for me, I'll be convinced I'm reading something with all the scientific rigor and moral efficacy of Paltrow's goop brand, forever fucking up my ability to consume and make use of the metaphorical placebo that is all of this process. I need to trust this process like people trust those sugar pills so I can do the work like their bodies do the work to get out of this. To get to the other side of this? To manage this? I don't actually know what my end goal is, what the other side of this looks like. Regardless, I'm working towards it. They say it's the journey and not the destination, right?

I was initially planning to use this journal to talk about my thoughts coming out of the first video I watched on the topic, except I fully forget the great majority of my thoughts because I got so caught up on the placebo tangent. I took notes during the video so I could reference them now, later, and also because note-taking is a great way to internalize information better so that it sticks with you but-- nothing in my notes feels as important or impactful as my impromptu, weirdly drawn-out placebo metaphor. Looking back at my notes, there's only one thing I feel really needs commenting on.

Right at the end of the video, the therapist who made it talked about her stress management tips video, which she linked down below, and to remember to practice good stress management while working on yourself because codependency can be a very complicated... thing to work on. At first I was a little nonplussed, I guess, at that. It felt like a plug to a video so that she could get more views rather than something relevant. After all, I'm here for codependency, not stress. And then captain obvious smacked me upside the head. It's stress. One of the forms that codependency takes in order to shape your behavior and emotions is stress. The inexplicable levels of pressure weighing down on all my organs I feel when I feel like I'm letting someone down, that's stress, dumbass. She also mentioned in the video that sometimes codependency means it's very hard for you to recognize your own feelings and needs, which I keep repeating to myself because I feel so dumb I have a literal degree in this and I didn't even notice--

Negative self-talk is bad. I know this. I know many things. It's okay when I don't know all the things, especially when it's the really close things about me. It makes sense that I didn't notice. So it's okay that I didn't notice. 

Yeah, I'm going to be trying out a lot of different stress management techniques. I kind of think it's like studying. You're not really taught how to study-- at least, not where I'm from. And then you'll get to higher-level education and you'll realize your study habits are all terrible and it's so easy but you never learned so now you're trying to lift even heavier weights with a back you sprained from lifting lighter weights incorrectly.

I'd like to keep on top of posting these journals regularly. Clearly it helps with the thought process since the whole placebo rant was buried at least five layers deeper than what I was conscious of. I've tried so many times, throughout my life, to keep a journal. From my childhood to now there's at least a children's section in a smaller town library's worth of half-empty notebooks for journalling. That would be an incredibly depressing library to be in.