bjmarren wrote:My wife has always been anxious and a bad sleeper from an early age, but lock-down last year exacerbated things, as it did for many people. We see the problem, at the moment, as more related to not being able to sleep as it seems as bedtime approaches, she has thoughts about not being able to sleep and this brings on even more anxiety. Your comments on therapy sessions certainly struck a chord and it's something we need to investigate, but as people were locked away for such things here,
Hi Brendan,
RE: Therapy sessions. You mention somewhere in this thread, something about "Bulgaria". So I may struggle to give practical advice. In the England it's fairly simple, one self-refers (no GP is needed)
This is the link for my area
https://www.cpft.nhs.uk/self-refer-here/
and I know from very close young relatives recent experiences, that the service is fully functional in Covid/lockdown times. The only difference is that the sessions occur over Zoom/Skype etc.
Slightly off-the-wall Brendan, I'm not a psychologist but your wife's behaviour at bedtime, sounds very like it's driven by compulsions. Do you think she has OCD?
OCD breaks down into 3 outward manifestations.
1. Checking
2. Hoarding
3. Cleaning
Every sufferer is different. I was mostly a "checker", with an element of hoarding. Some people have a more inward looking OCD, that known as PureOCD, which is more about intrusive thoughts leading to some quite scary and annoying thought patterns. I had an element of that too. Examples, being thinking about driving your car into oncoming traffic, thinking about doing GBH to friends and loved ones.
Anyway even without therapy by professional, there are plenty of decent books which may help to open doors. B4 my therapy got started I bought this which probably gave me a head start, for when I finally did get a therapist.
One recommendation, as a kind of self-help recipe, is to get your wife (it's a very personal thing and sometimes easier alone or with a non-family member/spouse) to catalog her whole life. That's what my therapist helped me with. It's like basic psycho-analysis. I ended up pin-pointing about 3 or 4 weird things (i.e. real or imagined memories / experiences) which were stuck in my head. The most easy to describe example being when I was 6 yr old, and we went on family holiday to Corfu. Mum and Dad left me to my own devices to find my way down from the bedroom to the breakfast hall. I ended up getting stuck alone in the lift.....didn't know what button to press as it moved up and down in the building! I was for several minutes absolutely petrified. That event itself set the seed for being anxious / needing confirmation of personal security more and more as my life continued. Anyway everyone has these type of experiences, but we are all effected differently. For me, discovering them, rationalising them, and realising that I didn't need to continue to be afraid of that type of event anymore opened the door to my recovery.
Matt