Last night I went to my General Anxiety Disorder class, aka GAD. I had missed it last week because of working graveyards and I was afraid I wouldn’t make it back in time before work. But anyway, this week we talked about and worked on doing thought records. There are 7 different steps.

1. You write down the situation (the who, what, when, where)
2. Your mood (what do you feel, and you rate the mood from 1 – 100)
3. Your automatic thoughts (what was going through your mind just before you started to feel this way? Any other thoughts? Images? Circle the hot thought). The hot thought is the one which you believe the most.
4. Evidence which supports the hot thought
5. Evidence that does not support the hot thought
6. Alternative/Balanced thoughts. (Write an alternative or balanced thought. Rate how much you believe in each alternative or balanced thought from 1-100)
7. Rate your mood now (Re-rate moods listed in step 2 as well as any new moods)

We also discussed doing a situation snapshot, finding alternatives to distorted thoughts. It’s a shorter version of the mood log.

1. Situation Snapshot. What specifically was happening at the moment
2. Feelings. Rate the intensity on a scale of 1-100
3. Automatic thoughts. Rate the credibility on a scale of 1-100.
4. Potential Distortions. (Like  fortune-telling, catastrophizing, ect.)
5. More Credible thoughts. Perspective of a wise friend. (Find the partial truth in the automatic thought)

I liked this one better than the other one. But the other one is better for therapy reasons. So I guess I have to get used to both of them. I also spent time coloring in class when we weren’t doing the exercises and I wasn’t taking notes.

Here are a couple pictures that I worked on yesterday.

So remember the weeping angel statue that we have? Well, my boyfriend hid it the other day and I found it yesterday while paying attention to Stormfly.

Stormfly doesn’t seem to care about the weeping angel.

 

Day 28

I’m not really sure on what I am looking forward to. We don’t have anything really set in stone minus Feast of Mars in October. I really want to go to Disneyland that same week, but I’m not sure that it will end up working out.

Back to everyday life…

I haven’t done much today. I went and saw Gucci, who managed to get into trouble in the middle of the night. We have a gate that we can shut that goes to his turn out from his main pen. Well, he seemed to have swiveled the gate around and started to itch his bum in the middle of the night. The gate door was not up for this and managed to tear a bit at both weld points. I don’t think they were designed to have 1500 lbs itching against a 50lb gate. So my dad tied the gate open so that he can’t do that again. Unfortunately that means we need a whole new panel and that gate/panel combo isn’t cheap.

I swung by the local craft store and picked up some yarn for a few more tails. I decided to start on my Cheshire cat style tail, so I needed pinks and purples. I ended up getting three different shades of each. I also got the right color blue yarn for my sonic the hedgehog style tail.

Doing it the new way takes a lot more time. I reached my three-hour mark, which is normally how long it takes me to make a tail. I’m barely half way done. And I have a brown paper bag full of pink and purple fluff. I’m not super pleased with how its turning out, but I have to remember I am trying something new and I don’t have the technique down quite yet. As I get better I can go back and fix it. I’ve already gone back and fixed the tip of the tail a few times already and so it’s slowly making and improvement.

I’ve spent my time crafting watching Downton Abbey again. I started season 6. Its making me really homesick. A year ago we were in Europe for my cousins wedding. I was showing my boyfriend around my home town. We were doing so many fun things. And now we are both hitting rough spots. I’m busy day dreaming of girly things (which I don’t normally do) when I should be more focused on whats going on in my life.

okay, that’s it for today. I’ve got to get back to my tail

Just keep swimming.

Or floating, in the case of the hedgehog.