My counseling appointment did not go quite like I had planned.  I am now back to once a week sessions, with some discussion about the possibility of raising the dosage of my depression medications.

A few weeks ago, I knew something was not quite right.  I even blogged about it a little bit.  I was feeling down, for a variety of reasons, and I knew that I needed to do something to turn it around.  I thought that I had done what I could to get things going in the right direction. Including an old favorite of pretending like everything was just fine. It appears that I was not successful.  Who would have thought that stuffing your emotions and faking it would not work?

My issue is that I am feeling an extreme emotional response to something, that emotional response is in the form of extreme anger, sadness and disappointment.  Since I have been really doing well with my Depression Recovery, that would be since September, I have had a few times where I have had to face extreme emotional responses to something, but I always managed to get through those.  This time however, for whatever reason, I got bogged down by my emotions and have not been able to pull out of it properly.

One of the first things I said to the counselor today, was that my memory problems were back to being as bad as when I first started seeing her, back when my depression was in full swing.  I also told her that all I wanted to do was to sleep.  I was fighting it, not going back to bed, but I fall asleep sitting up on the couch, in the middle of working on my blog, or even when I am talking to someone.  We discussed if I was having distracted thoughts, and while I am not having the racing thoughts that I did last year, my ability to concentrate is not as god as it should be.

My counselor brought up the topic of what has been on my mind of late and let me know that she thought that I was on a downward spiral towards a depressive episode. She gave me some homework to do.  We are going to see if spending extra time with her and the home work will be enough to get things going in the right direction again.  If not, there is always the option of increasing my doses of Effexor and Welbutrin.  I am on a very low does of Effexor, which is supposed to work on two chemicals in the brain.  My psychiatric doctor told me one time that sometimes, when Effexor is given in low doses it only ends up working on one of those brain chemicals, and it needs to be increased to work better.

I do want to point some positive things though.

• Even though I may be in a depressive episode, it is not even close to making me feel as sick as I did last year.
• There have been no suicidal thoughts.
• Even though I was actively stuffing my emotions when my counselor was on her honeymoon, when I did see her, I immediately began discussing it all with her.
• I shared some of what was going on with a family member.

I do not consider this a set back, it is merely something else I need to learn so I can continue to get better.

Yeah, things did not go as I had planned during my counseling session, but as my family  member pointed out, things rarely go like we plan.  In reality, that is probably a good thing.