Can anyone relate?
I've been talking with therapists once a week for years. For years now I wake up every day worried about my situation and want to find a way to become self-sufficient. Because of my agoraphobia and panic attacks, I've been unable to work in the only career I can earn a living wage and be self-sufficient. For the moment, I am safe but sometime soon my 90-year-old mother is going to pass away and I will be homeless. It's a symbiotic relationship, I care for her by cooking, cleaning, and all the things she needs to keep her out of a nursing home and she provides me with a roof over my head. Classic case of a grown man living in his mom's basement. I've run the gambit with SSDI appeals and they say I am not disabled. I've tried getting minimum-wage jobs just for the cognitive therapy aspect of it but it never lasts more than a few months before the panic attacks start, simply because I can't handle the stress of working with willfully cruel co-works, customers, and condescending management staff. This is all where my chronic depression stems from, ( My Situational Awareness ). My self esteem is junked, motivation is getting so hard. My state appointed social worker has been no help.
Even now sitting here writing, every therapy session, every time I think about working on myself, It's like picking at a scab that never heals, and there is the guilt we are all programmed with "Stop feeling sorry for yourself, just pick yourself up and stop being a coward, You're just being lazy work harder and you can fix yourself" Therapy Fatigue, I just sit back and watch the days, weeks, months, years slip past, knowing that all the future has for me is old age, poverty, and sickness. I can't even give up and institutionalize myself because I've been in those places and that is a living hell for someone who is tuned to pick up on other people's stress and emotions. And that would totally destroy my mother's last few years of life.
Well, rant and ramble over.