mooretrees journal

Where are you and where are you going?
ertyu
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Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:31 am

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by ertyu »

wish you a seamless sale, and fingers crossed for finding a good therapist soon!

mooretrees
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Joined: Sun Jan 27, 2019 1:21 pm

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by mooretrees »

thanks ertyu! Nothing to report on the house, another week or so before we hear about the appraisal but it all seems good.

I was in the hot seat today at the mastermind group. Hot seat is a misnomer, as it feels like I'm talking with old friends who are primed and ready to listen and give thoughtful, kind and challenging advice/thoughts. Each time the person in the hot seat gets to choose what the discussion is focused on after everyone does a short checkin. Today I chose mental health. Mine specifically. I won't go into what my situation is as it's more than my story and it's almost irrelevant to solutions actually. We talked about therapy, how to find a therapist, is it worth it to try and go through insurance (short answer, yes, up to a certain point), community, exercise and how to decide when to quit my (any) job.

My primary take aways were profound relief to problem solve this with this group and several actionable steps.

Firstly, I believe this extra expense will likely be short lived. I've been very focused on the expenses of therapy. I believe I don't have enough examples of people who use therapy for short timeframes. My best friend has been in therapy for the whole time I've known her (20 plus years) and now does couples therapy every other week as well. However, I heard several examples of people using therapy effectively for a few months and an 'as needed' basis. That is reassuring that I'm not committing us to a big monthly expense for EVER. This isn't really a step actually, but more of a needed reassurance.

Secondly, I'm also going to go the absolutely soul sucking route of trying to work with my insurance company. I'm hoping that going into this process with the understanding that it will be frustrating will make it easier to stick with it. Will reread parts of @Scott2's journal as needed to know it sucks and is normal to take a long time to figure it out. I will try and get any money spent applied to our deductible AND find an individual therapist in network. In a zoom world, it might be much easier to find a therapist who accepts my insurance. I'll have my job for the next bit of time, so might as well make that insurance cover some shit.

Community is the last piece for me. While I am a strong extrovert (who probably says it too much), I think I could be more deliberate in cultivating encounters with friends who are soothing to me and my family. Over the winter I planned a weekend getaway for my DH's birthday with several long term friend couples. It was astoundingly rejuvenating for us. There are fun friends, and there are friends who help me feel more myself when I'm with them. I'm grateful for both types of friends, but need to lean more on the latter category at the moment.

One question that I'm still mulling over is how much my job is contributing to my current problems? Would quitting my job make my life so much better it would be worth it? I have no intention to quit right away, but it's on the table in the nearish future. I have more thinking on this quitting part to do, but it's likely to look very reckless to any sort of 'normal' person. I won't have 4%, 33 x's expenses and all the other safety features that many folks focus heavily on here. I'm not saying they're wrong at all to do that, but my temperament and native risk tolerance seems unusual around here. We'll see what happens.

Also, AxelHeyst shared Andrew Huberman's youtube channel, damn! I'm going to dive into his work as well as review Johann Hari's writings as well.

ertyu
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Re: mooretrees journal

Post by ertyu »

On therapy: as you went through masterminding already, I'm sure this was mentioned, but as you didn't mention it in the post: a lot of it is the type of therapy. it's difficult to advise without knowing what the issue is, but if you are a strong T - type, go for cognitive behavioral therapy. If less so, you might look into brief solution-focused therapy (consciously activates resources and aims to nudge your thinking out of its current rut and onto the rails where your awareness of your own strengths, abilities, and resources helps you problem-sove) or commitment and acceptance therapy (a mash-up of cognitive behavioral and pop buddhism ("mindfulness")). Have your goals clearly defined, and do not hesitate to call your therapist out if you feel you aren't on track (so, my stated therapy goal is X, but we seem to be going a lot in Y direction lately, what's up with that).

Your friend who went to therapy for 20 yrs and is now in couple's therapy: sounds like she needs to dump the husband to be honest.

So, how much -is- your job contributing to your current problems? As someone who had issues w working full time/burn-out, I'm curious about how this looks like for you

shaz
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Location: Colorado, US

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by shaz »

In addition to pursuing insurance coverage for therapy, you might also check with your HR rep whether your employer has an EAP (employee assistance program). They are fairly common in mid-size to large companies as a companion to health insurance but employees tend to have low awareness of them. Often the EAP will specifically offer mental health benefits and it can be very easy to activate these.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for your house sale.

AnalyticalEngine
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Joined: Sun Sep 02, 2018 11:57 am

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

With respect to therapy, my experience has been you get better results when you view the therapist as a coach or tutor who's going to teach you new skills to apply in self-therapy rather than something that's going to provide the solution by itself. This way, you might only see a therapist for eight weeks to learn the new skills rather than be tied to it for years.

For example, I know my insurance will pay for only something like eight cognitive behavioral therapy sessions for a diagnosis of depression because the idea is you learn to apply that technique on yourself. (Although to be honest, I've never had good results with CBT.)

And echoing what @ertyu said, there are a number of schools of therapy, so it's helpful to research the methods behind each before going in. A Jungian therapist is going to be a vastly different experience than CBT.

I've personally had the best results with a trauma-informed approach mixed with grounding techniques, internal family systems, mindfulness, and journaling, but your mileage may vary. For me, the most important thing was becoming aware of how I felt, including the unconscious feelings, identifying where that belief came from, then finding a way to replace the limiting belief with something more positive. This is all stuff you can do in self-therapy, which is why I think finding a therapist to teach you skills you can employ yourself is the most important aspect of therapy.

As for a job contributing to mental health challenges and burnout, I've been there too. Burnout actually has a lot of symptom overlap with PTSD, which is the best description I can come up with of how burnout feels in the middle of it. When I experienced burnout, it was more the "crisis of faith" type of burnout rather than the overwork type of burnout, and I think your approach to it is going to be different depending on which type of burnout you're facing. I never quit my job through my burnout, but I did have to do a lot of self-therapy to change my underlying belief system about work to overcome the crisis-of-faith burnout.

Scott 2
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Joined: Sun Feb 12, 2012 10:34 pm

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by Scott 2 »

For what it's worth, I didn't find using my insurance to cover therapy difficult. Use of the outpatient mental health benefit is common enough, that you can call them and find out exactly what it is. Working with an in-network therapist, part of intake before the first appointment should be pre-authorization with the insurance company.

The insurance company knocked about 40% off the therapist's retail rate, making it around $130 per session. Once I'd met my deductible, there was a 35% copay on each appointment, which was about $50. That would have applied up to my max out of pocket.

When I had better corporate insurance, I believe the mental health benefit was a flat $35 per session copay.

I did find scheduling was tight, with appointments booking up to a month out. But that seems to be the way with any in-network medical provider these days.

mooretrees
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Joined: Sun Jan 27, 2019 1:21 pm

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by mooretrees »

Thanks all.

@ertyu, my friend's husband is one of the best guys, their marriage is strong, partly because of therapy. She's an hsp (highly sensitive person) so she's still in therapy as she gets great value out of it and she has the resources to pay for it. Thanks for the suggestions to research types of therapy, I really appreciate it. I'm lightly familiar with CBT but not enough to know if it could work for me. Will look into it more for sure as I don't know if I'm a T or not. Or an F for that matter.....

@shaz, I do have an EAP, and really appreciate the reminder to look into it.

@analyticalEngine, yes, I think the approach to viewing a therapist as a person to learn skills from is probably a great approach, thanks for saying that. I am more excited to try therapy now that I'm thinking of it as a short term, skill based effort.

@Scott2, I hope my experience is as smooth as yours was, I'm glad to hear it went well. I've heard the same from coworkers who use our local mental health providers, that they have to schedule two months out.

This mental health situation reminds me once again that it's easy to get boxed into a very narrow range of solutions. My problem solving skills for this were extremely small. However, now I feel like I have a lot of options and am grateful I reached out and also, that I didn't just book an appointment with the first therapist I contacted. Strategy and patience will hopefully help me navigate this situation gracefully.

ertyu
Posts: 2893
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:31 am

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by ertyu »

CBT is very skill-based. A good book that was written a while ago but instroduces how CBT therapists think is called Felling Good and is by Dr David Burns. Might be cheaper to check out than a therapist if your goal is to see whether CBT vibes

theanimal
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Re: mooretrees journal

Post by theanimal »

Depending on who you end up seeing they may be willing to work with you if your insurance doesn't provide coverage. I went to something like 6-8 sessions of therapy in 2019 and my insurance didn't cover it. During the first appointment my therapist said because of that she wasn't going to charge me what she usually charges for insurance (something like ~$200/hr), and that people without usually pay X, what number do I think is fair? I proposed a number slightly higher than X, which ending up being something like 60% off what she typically charged people through the insurance company.

I'd echo @AE's statements about trying to work with a therapist rather than expect a solution from them. I was disappointed in my experience because I expected more of the latter. That being said, she was CBT based and offered me many tools to deal with what I wanted to work on. That was valuable.

I'd also say that it's important to have a good fit and like the person you are talking to. I lucked out in that it was the first person I chose. I've heard of others that had to talk to a few people before finding a good match.

In my experience, many of the people who are in therapy long term (>10 years) identify with their problems and don't really want to change. That is their identity for better or worse. You have a strong mindset, are willing to put in the work and it sounds like you have an idea of things you want to focus on. So I don't think you'll have to worry about that. The cost sucks in the short term, but the end result is ideally a better you! And that is priceless.

mooretrees
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Joined: Sun Jan 27, 2019 1:21 pm

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by mooretrees »

Mental health update:
Talked with insurance and figured out how the coverage works, nothing covered until we met deductible $3k. Figured out how to submit dh's out of pocket therapy to apply it to the deductible. Also, @shaz was right, I do have the option to access a free therapist for five visits through my EAP. Waiting to hear from one to schedule the first visit. I'm sure i'll be 'cured' after five visits! The ball is rolling and I feel good with the basics of a plan outlined: use five free visits to increase skill building for anxiety, continue to look for longer-term therapist, and use insurance to pay for it all once we meet our deductible. I'm grateful for past me that put a bunch of money into our HSA, it's been great to use it for health stuff.

Health:
Our son tested positive for Covid Wednesday. Sore throat and a stuffy nose were his only symptoms. Yesterday he was back to high energy self, though still complaining of a sore throat. I felt crappy yesterday, had 100.5 temp, achy and tired. Napped for a few hours and today feel mostly back to normal. Tested negative yesterday with the rapid test. DH thought he had the beginnings of a sore throat and a little tired, so we'll see how he feels when he wakes up. If I test negative again tomorrow, I'll go back to work as normal next week. Seems likely that will happen as it's hard to imagine testing positive when my symptoms are fading.

House sale:
We sign paperwork electronically sometime today. Not sure the total amount of money we'll walk away with, something in the low 60's is likely. The money sounds awesome, but I'm actually feeling so fucking relieved NOT be responsible for that house and the rest of the mortgage. I am surprised by this, I thought having the money would be more exciting. We still have to move stuff out of the garage and if DH has covid that's gonna suck. Since I feel much better I might do the bulk of it.

Community:
Trying to hang with folks that are good for me led to an impromptu sauerkraut making party last week. Farmer friend gave me 14 pounds of cabbage that wouldn't sell (fine to eat but really unattractive) and I contacted two friends that I knew were into fermentation. We had a lovely evening making three different types of sauerkraut and talking fermentation. Three varieties we made were: beet and ginger, fennel and tarragon, and caraway. Plans are underfoot for a tasting party complete with attempts at a beet reuben on sourdough rye bread. One of my friends is a baker who is extremely knowledgable about gardening, preserving, baking with sourdough and all things delicious. She is way ahead of me in every marker for knowledge about fermentation, but I'm so aggressive about trying new things it's a good combo. She's excited about acorns and all things wild foods. We're both fermenting black walnuts for a preserve/jam (see website: https://foragerchef.com/cooking-with-green-walnuts/). Feels like I'm developing my community of people who are cool AND trying to learn skills.

Sale Money:
I guess we'll finally have hit our first $100k with the house sale and what's in my 401k. So we're looking at 2016 Prius to replace our aging, gas hog Subaru. Just kidding! :lol: I don't have clear plans for the money, just got a couple of books on the PP for starters. No plans to leave my job yet though I am considering a leave of absence in the spring of next year if it looks like we could actually do the motorcycle trip to AK. Still too far away to make any plans.

Bees:
Two out of three colonies are going gang busters. Last one is meh, not much change in population which is not good. I did some research on requeening, where I locate the current queen and kill her, then replace her with a different queen. Commercial beekeepers requeen yearly as they push their queens hard, ie there's no real winter chill time for her. There are some beautiful terms in beekeeping: queenright (fairly clear, queen is good and active) and my favorite, hopelessly queenless- where the colony won't accept a new queen or raise a new queen. Sounds tragic doesn't it?

The first step in deciding what to do with my meh colony is figuring out WHY they're not increasing in population. It's not cold, rainy or due to lack of nector/pollen. Ok, good. I did see eggs the last inspection which means the queen was alive within three days. Often it's too hard to find the queen during an inspection so finding eggs serves as a date range that she was active. The brood pattern was spotty, lots of holes so maybe she's not a good layer, had a bad mating flight or is weak. As I researched if requeening was the appropriate action I got overwhelmed. If I did requeen this colony, it would take at least 27 days to see if it was successful. I could attempt to force them to rear a new queen by ensuring there were eggs and then removing the weak queen. A queen is reared by the colony based on the food fed to an egg after three days of being laid. If I remove the current queen, the hive would know within a few hours that they were queenless. Queens produce pheremones that are central to her life, they let the colony know that's she healthy and so on. There's also the possibility that the colony has already raised a new queen and I was oblivious to it. So, I think my plan is to monitor how many eggs this current queen is laying every two or three days and then see what I find. After three visits, I'll see what I find and go from there. I can also move a frame of good healthy brood from a stronger hive and bump up the population of worker bees in a few weeks. One beekeeper video i watched suggested (not totally flippantly) to have the life cycle of worker and queen bees tattooed on yourself for easy reference. That life cycle chart will be essential to my decision on how to proceed. But, not considering getting a tattoo of it.

That's it, thanks all for the continued support!

Scott 2
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Re: mooretrees journal

Post by Scott 2 »

Glad you've found a path forward on the therapy.

For what it's worth - we do not spend money out of our HSA account. When I ran the math, the return was higher to keep it as a tax advantaged savings account. At 65 it can be drawn from as an IRA, or used as an HSA to pay medicare expenses.

Some people will save medical receipts, to reimburse themselves from the HSA at a later point in time. As I understand it, any medical expense incurred in a year you had the HSA is eligible.

mooretrees
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Re: mooretrees journal

Post by mooretrees »

@Scott2, we also haven’t generally touched the HSA, this year costs got too high and with double rent I dipped into it. I plan on funding it close to fully this year and leaving it alone for the future. Most of our medical bills get automatically added to the HSA website, so it makes it easy to pull money out if we need it. It is less clear how useful it is to someone earning less than $50k than someone earning $100k.

Scott 2
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Re: mooretrees journal

Post by Scott 2 »

mooretrees wrote:
Fri Jul 22, 2022 6:23 pm
Most of our medical bills get automatically added to the HSA website
That is a great feature. Is the HSA account administrator providing it? I haven't bothered with logging our expenses, because each one requires manual upload of a receipt.

shaz
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Location: Colorado, US

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by shaz »

Agreed, that is a great feature. I manually log mine into a spreadsheet which leads to errors plus time expenditure.

mooretrees
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Joined: Sun Jan 27, 2019 1:21 pm

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by mooretrees »

Yep, it is very convenient and it must be the account administrator. It doesn’t have every expense, but everything that gets logged with insurance. I had put a few charges in over the years and it was fairly easy. But I’m glad I don’t have to do it frequently.

mooretrees
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Joined: Sun Jan 27, 2019 1:21 pm

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by mooretrees »

house is sold, money is in our bank. Phew!!! We finally are finished with that house and I'm very relieved. The house felt like a burden the last three months. The stuff, the mortgage, the yard, it all felt like too much. The stuff is a lot less, though not entirely minimal as we rented a storage unit. I moved stuff into it while recovering from covid, that was very tiring. The last two days of moving DH was able to help. Though we both were still wiped from covid we emptied the last of the stuff out of the garage. The day we emptied the garage we also got the check and that was a lovely ending to home ownership.

The money doesn't feel real. The bank account is bigger than ever before in my life, and it feels fake. To celebrate we got ice cream and spent hours at a local creek.

School bus:
It's crunch time for the bus. We can stay at this apartment longer if we wanted to, but DS starts kindergarten late August. It's a commute that I don't want to make four days a week. DH is working on the flooring, getting pretty close to installing it. He installed the window ac unit as the temps have been in the 90's and it was not up to the task of cooling the bus. The ceiling is still not insulated, so once it gets insulated, the ac unit should function better. At this point, moving into the bus at the end of the month is the plan. We have a mostly finished bedroom, a partially finished kitchen and a lot of flexibility about living in it. It will be rough I'm sure. I'm starting to plan for how to make the transition as smooth as possible. So far it involves a lot of moving winter clothing into the storage unit and another round of purging. I will be setting up a meeting with the owners of the property to talk rental agreements and practical stuff; finalizing where it's getting parked (we know, but getting that spot ready), storage of bikes/motorcycles, a place to put our chest freezer and access to laundry.

Laundry:

I've been researching off grid ways to wash clothes. Right now we're spoiled in that we can pop upstairs and do a load whenever we want. Going forward, I'm assuming it will be less of an option to use the main houses washer machine. I haven't asked about using their washer, but I'm preparing to start handwashing at this point. I'm interested in the bucket with a plunger option, but need to research how to wring out the clothes. Hand wringing seems ineffective and hard. Hand washing seems like will push me to have more clothes as insurance against running out?

Health:
I've got a session with both a chiropractor and a therapist scheduled next week. I'm cautiously optimistic the chiropracter can help with two specific areas, neck and left hip. I've had two knee surgeries on my left knee and I think I have some long tern dysfunction based on my hip. I've tried yoga, deep massage with a golf ball, exercises to release the hip muscles and nothing helps for a long time. I think I've done what I can at home. I'm as much looking for an adjustment with my hip as well as an assessment of the area. If the chiro isn't very helpful I'll move on to myofascial/deep tissue massage. I don't think this will cure me, as much as possible accelerate what I can do on my own. I'm hoping to continue to be active and these two areas limit me now. I am happy with the progress I've made on my own, but am curious what can happen pursuing these other options.

horsewoman
Posts: 659
Joined: Fri Jun 07, 2019 4:11 am

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by horsewoman »

When I was a kid we had a separate device for spinning the laundry. I think it was from the time my gran did not have a washing machine. Basically it does only the spinning cycle. The water simply flows out from a drain. It made quite the racket, but I suppose it needs s lot less electrical power than a washing machine.

A few years ago an aunt wanted to get rid of hers, so I guess they are still around? Might be worth a shot to try a Craigslist search?

chenda
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Location: Nether Wallop

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by chenda »

Maybe you need a mangle?

not sure
Posts: 141
Joined: Fri Feb 05, 2021 2:34 pm

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by not sure »

Congratulations on the house, @mooretrees!
Sounds like that chapter is closed and you are opening a new one. When something big like this happens, I try to think to myself - "who do you want to be in this new chapter, how do you want to show up for others"? Something to ponder? ;)

mooretrees
Posts: 762
Joined: Sun Jan 27, 2019 1:21 pm

Re: mooretrees journal

Post by mooretrees »

@horsewoman, yep, i think the spinner is key, but maybe not if i only do a few items?

@chenda, i had to look up the mangle, that's a cool piece of equipment. I need to experiment with hand washing without buying equipment first to get a sense of what is essential and what is just sorta cool. Plus, where to store this stuff once we're in the bus.....

@not sure, great questions to ponder, thanks for the prompts!

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