Learning to Trust Again

One thing that I've found particularly difficult about being depressed is that I've learnt to not trust my feelings. Since I've felt bad for so long, and been told that everything's fine, I've come to have a deep distrust for my emotions. One way this has manifest itself is by making it very hard for me to know when I'm not well. I can easily recognise obvious signs of physical illness, such as a blocked nose or fever, but I really struggle with symptoms that are potentially psychogenic. Some symptoms that I get quite frequently are insomnia, headache, nausea, loss of appetite and the whole gamut of emotions like anxiety, sadness, contempt and disgust with myself.

When I get these symptoms, it's hard for me to know if I am "genuinely" unwell, or if I just need to "get on with things". I'm often stuck worrying if I should take time off work, see my doctor, my psychologist, and all the other things that I know help me when I'm depressed, or if I should go to work and try to push through it. Most of the time I do the latter, but every now and then I'll call in sick and feel guilty as I'm not convinced that I'm "really" unwell.

This might be the result of a latent belief that mental illness is not "real" illness, and that it's all in my mind. Or I might have been scarred by spending 9 years in a job where the culture was to make everyone feel really guilty for calling in sick. Or it might be because of my childhood where my mother was in turns sceptical of us when we were sick, and strangely easy to convince we were unwell on the basis of vague and minor symptoms.

Probably it's a bit of all of the above.

Anyway, it'd be nice to be able to just trust how I'm feeling, be able to say to myself "I'm not well today" and take time off without feeling guilty for doing so. But then, that's probably on par with saying it'd be nice to not feel depressed.