The Self-Authoring Suite at http://www.selfauthoring.com/
I figured to just put it there in the subheading to get past the suspense. I want to make clear, though, that the “breaking” I’m talking about was actually a form of progress for me.
In mid 2015, suffering from daily panics attacks, fractured and nightmare-fueled sleeping, and constant low-level anxiety, I was grabbing at every solution I could find. My GP put me on Lexapro to help with the anxiety, and after a month, it did indeed curtail both my panic attacks and anxiety. Still, I knew what was sleeping under the surface of my consciousness like a leviathan waiting to rise up and devour me, and it was scary. Meds are great, but I was fully aware of the fact that the prescription was a stop-gap measure.
I read about the Self-Authoring Suite somewhere online, possibly this article at NPR, and I thought it might help me deal with my issues and get me back on track in the direction I wanted to go instead of hurtling downhill at breakneck speed.
It didn’t.
Not because it didn’t work, though, but because it did. In going through the “present virtues authoring” exercises, I stalled. I stalled so hard I broke down crying.
The exercise followed the creation of a list of virtues I believe about myself, stuff like “I have a vivid imagination” and “I’m intelligent”, and asked me to write about a time when those virtues helped me deal with a problem or contributed positively to my life. And I simply…could not think of anything. I drew a blank.
I was horrified and devastated by my inability to write a response.
Not because I don’t think any of my virtues have ever helped me in that way, I’m sure they have, but because I was unable to think of a time that they did. It was as if I was looking back at my life with a myopic and greasy lens.
That was the turning point, that was when I knew it was time to go back into therapy and root out my problems. I realized, staring at that damn blinking cursor, that if this was the kind of llama-drama my brain was practicing, then I needed professional help in tackling it.
I started therapy in late 2015 with a specialist in EMDR, and it’s been cathartic and profound. It’s reshaped my life over the past year, and while I’m not “done” (who ever is?) I feel like I’m not just on stable ground, but bed rock.
Yet in all that time, I never went back to the self-authoring site.
A friend posted about it today on facebook, and remembering that I had, indeed, purchased access to the suite of tools, I logged back in. Instead of picking up where I left off, I went straight to “future authoring” module and spent nearly three hours plugging away at the exercises there. It’s a challenging set of questions that require thoughtful and earnest answers. Afterwards I felt great, not only because I finished the whole module, but because I had written out some revealing insights about my goals and my dreams.
This is why I highly recommend the whole suite, which for a paltry $30 is worth the investment. Hopefully it won’t lead you directly to therapy, but it might, and either way you’ll learn something about yourself that you did not realize before.
