See a guy about being crazy...

I've posted before about anxiety problems. I started with the EAP (employee assistance professional; a kind of counselor paid for by the job) this week, and the guy I saw gave me homework to write every day about what brought me to him; my notes for the assignment are as follows:

Just saw (Name) for the first time, and he told me to start a journal, to include:

• Daily writing abut anxiety and work
• What I tried to do to make it better
• Successes & “non-successes” (a way to avoid the word “failure”, I guess)
• Sleep & Exercise

I've only written three times (once, just prior to this post, about this insomnia - it's 3:22, and I've been awake over an hour), but it's really helping. My first notes helped me see some of the strategies that have not been useful, and just seeing him and talking about it made me realize that a memory that recently came up - that I wasn't even sure was a real memory (I have at least one other "memory" of an event that I'm sure did not, in fact, happen) - was of a real event, and knowing that gave me some control over it.

He's talked about referral to either a psychiatrist for medication, or someone for behavioral interventions, but I'm not sure I'm going to need it. (Of course, I'm not now in the depths of the anxiety; I don't know if the tools I have now will dig my way out of that cave when I fall in it again. Or maybe I'll have different tools, so I won't get into the cave in the first place.)