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Years ago, I bore two sons into my abusive marriage. Young and naïve, I thought my husband would change into a loving man when he felt unconditional love from and for the children. I thought that real love would end his cruelty toward me, and that he and I would create a loving family. I thought wrong.
On a warm October day, I hurried to to class, maneuvering around groups of slower-moving students. I checked my phone - fifteen minutes before class started, enough time to pop into the mini mart and buy some iced tea or soda. Approaching the entrance, I smelled the faint scent of fresh cigarette smoke from a passerby. Then my eyes caught the posters featuring cigarette brands on the mini mart door. All of the sudden, pleasurable memories wafted over me. I could feel the cigarette between my fingers and taste the hot smoke. I was experiencing a smoking craving.
More tips on keeping a job when you have depression? Yes. More. In the last article, I shared five tips for how to maintain a job with depression. Most of those tips centered around physiological wellness enhance performance on the job. This article will delve into five additional things you can do to keep a job when you have depression.
I am a working mom with two challenging jobs. I'm parenting a teenage boy with mental illness and I'm an airline pilot. The parenting job is much harder. I often say I would rather land my plane in the Hudson River with no engines, than undergo the tailspin of raising a child with bipolar disorder and social anxiety.
We all have moments where flashbacks occur and we want to give in to the unsafe triggers around us. However, even though flashbacks can be haunting to those who self-harm, they can also make you realize how far you have come and how much you have grown. If you look at your past with a positive mindset, even if the past you are looking back at is negative, you may be able to gather a fresh perspective.
This blog is specifically geared toward combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), however, there are many people outside of this situation who also suffer from PTSD. This blog is not meant to suggest that this significant group of people doesn’t exist. Here is some information about PTSD in multiple populations.
I'm scared for this winter. It's not simply the vicious cold and the almost daily dump of snow that I'm dreading, but the annual worsening of my depression. While I haven't been diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder, I know that winter affects my depression symptoms.
Have you heard of social media addiction? In droves, we engage on social media with selfies, Likes, follows, and shares. These are actions that positively re-enforce the idea that social media tools provide us with good feelings. Like any pleasure-seeking activity, social media tools are addictive. With our society’s dramatic shift toward interacting over the internet and social media tools, it is easier than ever to develop an addiction to social media. Just recently, a man was treated for an addiction to Google Glass™.
When I said that The Courage to Heal isn’t on my recommended reading list, I thought I knew precisely why I felt that way. Written for survivors of child sexual abuse and popular among people with dissociative identity disorder, the book seems to assume that the reader has repressed memories, even going so far as to say in its first edition, “If you are unable to remember any specific instances [of abuse] but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did.” That quote felt deeply problematic to me, but in hindsight, I see that I didn’t fully understand why. Now I do: it’s unintentionally reminiscent of the mind-bending child sexual abuser logic that helped cultivate my dissociative identity disorder.
My trauma happened in childhood and completely severed me from any healthy sense of self. Later, one of my biggest problems in recovery from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was this: I felt completely disconnected from who I had been before my trauma and who I had never had the chance to be because of my trauma. I grieved that lost girl and the woman she might have become. In fact, the grief I experienced was so vivid it felt like a jab in my soul. I resented that trauma had taken from me so many opportunities at the same time that it turned me into someone I neither liked nor completely understood.
I believe she will only be able to rid herself of her demons, and hopefully her BPD as well, when she's ready to confront the abuse of her father. If she can put the blame where it belongs, she may stop projecting that victim/perpetrator cycle on the present men in her life. These demons are a metaphor for the purgatory she has created for herself. That reality has consequences in the real world, but it need not be real in the tangible sense. Exorcising her demons will require the expenditure of real physical energy and probably the destruction of aspects of her personality. If this ever happens, and it's possible but not probable, then these demons will evaporate. They are only as real as one's personality is real. In short, reality is not the question, it's what you make of the things you feel to be real.