Belated Welcome, Shavtay2007
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Belated Welcome, Shavtay2007
| Tue, 03-20-2007 - 10:32am |
Hi Tziporah,
I am so sorry that this is such a belated welcome to you. I've been absent from the board for nearly a month - so many things have been happening in my life that it was difficult to also come here. The good news is that life has somewhat calmed down (but I'm still crossing my fingers and my toes), which means that I'm back on iVillage.
I am so very happy to see you here, participating and sharing in our conversations! I hope that we'll get to know each other better in the coming weeks.
Welcome again!
(PS: I love the sound of your name!)

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Hi Tziporah,
I wasn't around yesterday as I spent the entire day sleeping on and off.
Jumping in real quick to ask if you're starting to feel better, Karen.
I thought I was going to die last night but that must have been me getting over the hump as they say.
I'm glad that you're starting to feel better.
I'm so sorry you've been so ill.....sounds like it was a bad virus.....I'm sending you healing energy, P&PT's.....do you believe in Reiki?
Oh I know.
Thank you, I'll take it!
Hi Karen,
It's been an incredibly hectic week. Sorry I didn't get back till now.
I hope by the time I'm writing this your fever has come down and you are back to normal.
I'm so happy your son was there to help you. If we've brought them up right, the theory goes, then they will be there for us as parents. It seems that on this front you've done okay.
As for myself, a lot of important things have happened.
My therapist has been stressing for some time that I have to get out of the analysis-paralysis mode, get beyond my thoughts, which often sabotage me, and do more action. Over the past few weeks I really have been trying to do that.
I finally found a business coach I like. I was going nowhere doing it by myself. This business coach runs a training course for starting online businesses and I signed up for it and paid. Not too expensive. I checked with one of my former coaches before doing that and he said this was a good move. First, because the guy doing it is very solid and well-known. Second, because it's a very structured program, which is what I need--structure. There are also a lot of opportunities to connect and network with others, and that is critical when trying to get started.
I've also become more open in publicizing the fact I'm blind. That is one of the main issues we have been working on in therapy--getting more comfortable talking about my blindness. I have done this by mentioning it with other facts about myself. Putting it in among other details feels safer to me. So far, the reception about this fact has been good. In fact, I found out there is another blind person taking this course and the support team said they'd tried to link us up. That was quite a surprise!
Also, on the elevator front, there has finally been some movement. But it has been a process throught with a lot of emotion. All the neighbors who are opposed to it have come out of the closet. Need I say more? The fact is, we were getting nowhere on are own. We were tied up in red tape from here to Alaska. Shabtai got a friend of his who works in the public sector to represent us and he was able to use a lot of connections we just don't have. So, that has been a source of a lot of stress as well.
Plus, my mom is having some health issues.
Put all of this together--and--wow--what a whammy.
My luck. I had thought, (I should have known better--that this was going to be one of those regular, ordinary, nothing-happening-here kind of weeks and I had scheduled for a break on my Monday therapy session.) The truth is, until Monday, nothing much was happening and I didn't see any reason for having a session when there would be nothing to talk about. My therapist was open to skipping a session. But by Sunday, I was already beginning to feel a bit lower--finger-biting increasing, that kind of thing. But I couldn't put my finger on WHY. (No pun intended.) So, when all of this rigamarole started happening post-Monday, I really went into high gear stress. Shabtai said I just kept getting angry and agitated. At first, I didn't even notice it. Then, slowly but surely, I did begin to notice it, but still couldn't figure it out. So, by the time therapy came around on Thursday, I had more than enough to talk about. I was full, if not overloaded.
Eventualy, it all got unraveled and sorted out and he made sense out of it all, or helped me to make sense out of it all, or a bit of both. This is the important part--near the very end of the session, we went back to the part where I had said I started to realize I wwas out-of-balance but couldn't understand why. That is when he said: "Therapy is meant to make the unconscious thoughts conscious." Meaning: my unconscious thoughts were making me feel out-of-balance, and were cusing to be respond in an angry, agitated way. but I couldn't identify the thoughts until we had talked through them, after which, they became conscious. That is, as I talked, the thoughts which were triggering this reaction became conscious.
This principle is, in fact, the primary premise of psychodynamic therapy and the therapy from which psychodynamic therapy was derived, mainly, psychoanalysis. Although I have read about this principle many times, I think, for the first time, the psychodynamic theory behind this principle finally made sense because I had experienced it to be true.
I told him I had also hoped that now that I am really and truly becoming more active, I could get by with one session per week. Once again, though, I saw that I still cannot manage it. The active mode itself is causing my thoughts to become more unconscious as I focus on my thoughts less and that itself is causing the stress level to rise. He said that was a goal worth working towards--getting to the point where I can finally manage on one session a week. You'd think after ten years of continuous therapy I could be at that stage by now. But I'm not. Exept for vacations, it's still twice a week.
It's a little discouraging to me that I still can't manage on once-a-week, but I have to accept that. Just like I have to accept that for now I need the daily meds of 20mg of Paxxil.
My religious learning has really gone down since I've gotten more involved in the business side of things and this course. I have to address that. I'm trying to find the right balance between everything. I still haven't found the right proportions.
This week I only watched two movies and I didn't play them over and over as I had before. They were two movies with Julie Andrews. Actually, quite delightful. Not serious films for a change, but musical commedy and I laughed. So, I know that even though this is a kind of secondary addiction, it lessened this week. I watched Thoroughly Modern Millie and Darling Lily--both great films for anyone who wants a little diversion.
And it was probably a good thing I could actually laugh during some of the funnier moments. At my mother-in-law's, she had the radio turned onto a classical music and there was a piano concerto playing. It was quite relaxing. I had almost forgotten how wonderful itis to listen to classical music. I hadn't done that in quite some time.
And it's been quite awhile since I looked at other threads on this board. I really should start doing that again soon. My fingers are so-so, some sores. Not bad, but not without them either.
So, that's what's going on from here.
Tziporah
blog: tziporahwishky.livejournal.com
web: www.istillhavemylife.com
blog: tziporahwishky.livejournal.com
Hi Tziporah,
A very quick hello from Jakarta. I am glad to see that you have a business coach to help you with your own coaching business. I just had a session with one yesterday, on a business that we are building together.
I hope that plans for the elevator move forward in a good way for you. No doubt there will be stress involved since there are neighbours who are opposed to it, but I hope that it gets installed.
It's already been a long year here, with emotional coaster rides coming one after the other. On the flip side, there have also been many good things happening in my life, too and I am grateful for that.
Talking about movies, I'm going to see one today. It's rare that I go to the cinema but once in a while I do so. We're either going to watch Prince of Persia or Shrek.
Classical music is indeed very soothing, isn't it? I miss playing it, but right now I don't have a piano so that's out of the way. The only other musical instruments available at home are my late father's violin and his flutes, so I might take the flute up. What I would love to learn is the cello, though!
Take care and talk to you very soon!
Hello, Poppy,
Glad you stopped by. A nice surprise.
I didn't know you played piano. I took piano lessons for about nine years, starting at age seven, and got to a decent level of classical music. But, unless you practice, it falls away. That is what happened to me. But I still enjoy hearing it and find the piano particularly soothing. Ditto with voice, which I studied during high school.I did solo and sang in a lot of choirs. I love listening to that as well.
I took violin for one year in fourth grade.
Shabtai plays violin, but not the classic genre--rather, the Arabic genre, which he learned while growing up in Beirut.
For anyone who might be confused, Shabtai, my husband, was born in Lebanon and left when Jews started leaving in 1968. I actually bought him a violin as a gift. Sometimes--not often enough, unfortunately--we'll play together, with him on the violin and myself either on the piano or accordion, which I learned after coming to Israel.
From your email, it's hard to know if you play the flute and/or violin as well. Do you?
When my parents are here, we go to concerts.
Karen, this could be a good idea for a new thread--people telling what music they like or what instruments they play.
Poppy, Tell me about the thing
with your business coach. Sounds interesting.
You're right about the description with the year--roller coaster/good things happening. Things were going quite slowly for awhile, but now things are happening super-fast.
It's been a year since we first started working on the elevator, but it looks like the light at the end of the tunnel of red tape is in sight. This business coach is also quite demanding, so I have a lot of work on that front. Plus, I'm giving four teleclasses a week and some of them require preparation. Shabtai's father is also not in the best of health and my mother also has health issues. I'm making progress in therapy--working hard trying to put what he recommends into practice.
You know, Poppy, today I was thinking about Amanda. Any idea of what's going on with her? I really miss her. She was so interesting--talking about the activities she was involved in. I hope everything's okay with her.
Take care of yourself.
Tziporah
blog: tziporahwishky.livejournal.com
web: www.istillhavemylife.com
blog: tziporahwishky.livejournal.com
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