Clarity?

For my monthly therapy session on July 10^th, I planned to talk about my relationship to my meds.

Working on my memoir, I had remembered an insightful question Thomas, my therapist since 2003, had asked eight years ago. At the time, I was overwrought when a neurologist had suggested my long-term hand tremor might be Parkinson’s Disease.

“What does that mean for you?” Thomas had asked.

I immediately saw the two interpretations the question invited: what would having Parkinson’s mean to my daily life and what did the diagnosis symbolize for me.

I have been terrified of Parkinson’s for fifty years, and his question helped me to see that my mind was spinning uncontrollably towards an imaginary future instead of sitting in the present moment, where the possible diagnosis impacted nothing tangible. I was living in the terror of a constructed, dismal future.

Arriving at the neurologist's office, I  had believed the tremor was medication-induced and expected it to continue, stable and unchanging. I hoped for a cure, but I had made an uncomfortable peace with it. Suddenly an awful future loomed before me. Can we just go back an hour, my mind pleaded, to when I thought I had a medication-induced hand tremor, not a life-altering, lethal disease?

I’ve struggled with this medication for over a decade, trying multiple times to get completely off , mostly without medical supervision. I’d been trying again (under the supervision of my current psychiatric nurse practitioner (NP) this time) and it hadn’t gone well. No catastrophe, but symptoms that worried me, Jim, and my therapist.

As I talked to Thomas two weeks ago, my question mirrored his earlier one: what meaning does this drug have to me? Why have I struggled so long to remove it from my life? I had promised my NP not to do anything until our next appointment in August and I assured my therapist I wouldn't. But after that, I really wanted to try, again, to taper off it.

Thomas looked thoughtful and said, “I’ve heard from my friends in recovery (a.k.a. Alcoholics Anonymous) that doing the same thing and expecting different results is…”

“Yeah, I know: the definition of insanity.”

That shook me: is my quest insanity? Could it literally lead to that state I've experienced three times in my adult life?  I brought the conversation up in a DBSA-Boston support meeting. I rarely say anything so revealing. Why do I chafe against it, I wondered aloud? Couldn't I just try again, tweak the experiment, get a different answer?

Lucy, a longtime friend, talked about the challenge of getting clarity. After the conversation had moved on to other topics, she circled back to say, with urgency in her voice, that a phrase kept coming into her mind: black-and-white thinking. That’s a cognitive distortion, a warped thinking pattern where one can’t see nuance, options, and different viewpoints and interpretations. Everything in life is simply black or white, on or off, virtuous or evil, Nothing in moderation.

This took me aback: was my thinking irrational? I respect her clarity and added her words to Thomas'. Was my quest to get off the drug dangerous? Couldn’t I just try it one more time? Tweak my procedure a bit and get a different result? Or had I made the definitive trial and found an undeniable need for the drug?

Do I need to SWIM!  (Stop Whining Instantly, Mary!)? I’ve been relatively stable for over ten years. The meds and therapy have kept me out of the hospital. I’ve been able to function, live a full life, even find joy and happiness. What is this impulse to cut back, to take none of this particular medication?

Is it insanity to try to taper down again? Can I find peace and clarity after 25 years of struggle against any and all psych meds?

I haven’t admitted this specific struggle to many. I wouldn’t have brought it up in the group except that I was confident that no one in the group would look to my example and stop taking their meds. I’m 63 years old. I present as a mature adult who has made peace with her circumstances. I’m not a reckless teenager, or am I?