Occasionally, I realize that this business of helping people change their moods is a bit like the false pride that proceeds a fall. It’s easy to have an overweening sense of power.
A woman who I’ve been seeing for a couple of years has been in an increasingly flat, depressed state. She has taken care of most of her obligations, but does nothing more than the minimum and is largely unresponsive and unreactive to others. This woman decided to try a medication to help her get a bit more energy. At a small dose, she felt a bit better but not much better. In order to achieve a greater affect, we increased the dose. All of the sudden, she began to feel extremely sensitive, reactive, and irritable.
She describes this feeling as feeling like she wants to curse at everyone, feeling such a sense of frustration about things and about her life, needing to see things change urgently, combined with the ability to quickly shift into tearfulness.
Certainly this is a far cry from apathy, but this kind of dramatic change in mood was extremely disturbing to her. In part, it invoked a sense of uncertainty about “not even knowing who I am”, since she is usually an extremely passive person.
The trick is going to be trying to find a way of bringing the energy down a notch so she can control and channel it towards constructive purposes, while at the same time not taking her all the way back into the “flatland” that she has been in.
The analogy that occurred to me was the gasoline engine in the cars that most of us drive. It is powered by explosions, but those explosions are useful only because they are so well controlled and well contained. The key to their irritable energy is having good enough containers that keep it from getting out of control.