Bring your unconscious forward

Moody psychiatrist Dr Christin Drake, explains how logging moods helps her patients validate their experiences, connect their symptoms to hormones and other factors, and care for themselves in targeted ways.

I often consult with women who know something is not right, but they find exactly what is going on is difficult to describe and define. Their symptoms are real, but seem unrelated: They may feel irritable and fatigued at times, energetic and powerful at others. Sometimes they cannot tolerate an afternoon coffee or an evening glass of wine, and sometimes they are just fine. 

Now, these are smart women—highly educated, in successful jobs and managing hectic family and social lives. But women are often socialised not to spend too much time thinking about ourselves, afraid that we’ll become hysterical or self-indulgent. We’re taught to shake off our moods, that they are saboteurs, out to get us into trouble. We often don’t connect our moods to hormones. And if we are, we’ve been taught that hormonal influences are wild and unpredictable, not something we could ever figure out or control. As such, recognising helpful patterns in our moods and our behaviours can be hard to spot - because we’re not tuned into them.

This stigma breeds shame, and that shame can bring an insidious influence on how we imagine ourselves and our possibilities. The worst of this is when I see a woman who has come—after many difficult periods, or perhaps a difficult peripartum time—to believe that she, herself, is difficult.  

It’s far from the truth, and we just need to change our thinking. If we can understand our hormonal cycles and their influence on our individual bodies and brains, it can prepare us for the more challenging feelings that accompany the hormonal shifts. Sometimes just that understanding yields an adjustment in perspective— we learn that these sensations and emotions are related to the healthy functioning of our bodies, that they’ll pass, and perhaps that we know what helps ease the discomfort. Other times, learning about our moods, hormones and patterns means that we decide to change what’s happening externally - what we expose ourselves to and put into our bodies. At other points, after tracking symptoms, we may need to seek outside help.

So, how to begin to value, not fear, our moods and hormones? How to see our own patterns? In psychotherapy we believe in the power of bringing the unconscious forward. The thinking goes that if we can see and understand the forces that motivate our actions and influence our emotions, we can more easily exert some control. 

I have seen the power of tracking in action in the women who come to see me. Self-discovery, and the knowledge that our patterns are knowable and that our moods are useful, can be an incredible salve: being able to move what is movable, to care for ourselves in targeted ways, to have a counternarrative to the one that tells us we are unreasonable and unwieldy. It can be afreeing shift from a position of frustration and shame about what our bodies may not allow us to do to one of reverence for what our bodies are doing, and bring back a sense of control into our hands.

Dr Christin Drake, MD

Psychiatrist, professor and founder of parenting platform, Real Mothering

Dr Christin Drake, MD is an Assistant Attending Psychiatrist at The New York Presbyterian Hospital - Weill Cornell Medical Center and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College. A firm believer in the importance of pattern tracking, her methods champion the power of ‘bringing the unconscious forward’, an approach which allows her patients to acknowledge and reflect on what may be impacting their actions and emotions from an internal perspective. As a Moody psychiatrist, she informs the approaches for both the app technology and content.