I’m continuing to do poorly. Indeed, it’s feeling like this blog is ill-named, since it’s hardly DBT recovery anymore. It’s DBT backsliding. True, my depression has improved, in the sense that I’m not crying all the time and I’m not suicidal. That really is progress and I need to remind myself of it. However, my fear levels remain very high. And I continue to suffer from anhedonia, which is a lack of interest in anything that used to give me pleasure: I don’t feel like eating, reading, watching movies, etc.
One thing that is known to help overcome anhedonia is participating in activities that connect with one’s values. E.g., as has been the case in the last ten days for me, assisting refugee families has lifted my spirits and motivated me. This realization prompted my therapist Rachel to have me do additional work on my values. I’ve explored them before, i.e., I’ve reflected on and written about the sort of person I want to be. But she thought even more “values work” might help.
My homework, then, was to mark up a list of 60 potential values as Not so important, Quite important and Very important. Then, I was to try to find a pattern by clustering the Very important ones into just a half dozen or so core values.
Here’s the result. I was able to reduce my 20 or so “Very importants” into eight categories:
1) Adventure, challenge and self-development
2) Caring, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, kindness, love, and supportiveness
3) Contribution and social connection
4) Fairness
5) Humour, fun
6) Responsibility and trust
7) Persistence, industry and courage
8) Intelligence and creativity