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Saying No is probably THE hardest thing to do. But, not only with the kids. I'm talking about saying no to other adults - friends and family. While parenting a child with mental illness is a challenge, having the adults in your life asking you for things may add to the stress you already feel. Piling on more things to do when you're already under pressure is no good. And that's no way to practice good self-care.
Last week, I was interviewed on the news. This is beyond anything I usually do. As a counselor, I usually sit in a room with one or two people. Listening is much more important than talking in that context, so I am not very experienced at sounding poised. I don't think ideas come out of my mouth as smoothly as someone who teaches or speaks regularly.
So this was daunting. I just pictured myself "um"ing and "uh"ing, forgetting what I am saying. I was scared. This was way out of my comfort zone. So why didn't I just avoid it?
Did you know that Miss Piggy can teach us a lot about anger? For the lesson, watch this video. Note Miss Piggy's hysterical but understandable overreactions, and ask what you can learn from them.
They say that music can soothe the savage beast. In this video, More Than Borderline's Becky Oberg explores music's therapeutic benefits and plays an original song on her Native American flute.
As someone who speaks candidly about the stigma of mental illness, I have somehow never mentioned men who suffer from undiagnosed, untreated depression.
For reasons that we can all speculate about individually, men are less likely to label their negative affect and thoughts as depression and are more likely to resort to alcohol or drugs, violence, gambling and even womanizing in order to combat their feelings of mental discomfort.
As I spoke of last week, nearly half the population view mental illness as some sort of personal weakness. I would wager that when discussing men and depression that this number is quite fitting. It goes against everything a man is stereotypically supposed to represent: strong, silent, in control, powerful and commanding.
The website www.mensdepression.org has a mandate of alleviating the stigma surrounding male depression which they place into two groups: overt and covert depression.
Some of you may remember when “Bring Your Daughter To Work Day” was rolled out. This innocuous exercise in low-grade social engineering was intended to introduce young girls to the entire spectrum of work in order to free them from the socially imposed blinders which psychologically limited their career options to a gruesome choice between homemaker, secretary and waitress.
Apparently it worked. Today there are more women in the workforce than men, and, not unspurprisingly, one might travel many a kilometer of rough gravel today before encountering a homemaker, secretary, or waitress.
So, let’s take heart as we consider that those who strategize and implement our social evolution, them, the powers that be, the hands behind the curtain, those unnamed unknown unseen Machiavellian magicians do in fact know what they are doing because they have our best interests at heart or so I keep telling myself.
When it comes to recovery from active addiction, there are many approaches and treatments that have been tried over the years (see The Best Way to Quit Using Drugs). Research has shown that addiction is a physiological disease that manifests itself in abnormal behavior. Along with this is the idea that the addict’s disease actually began before the individual picked up the first drug.
Bipolar disorder can be a very debilitating illness, to the point where many people have hampered lives because of it. People may find that they can’t have families or jobs because of their disabling bipolar disorder.
And there is nothing wrong with these people. These people are just learning to live a different kind of life because life, unfairly, besought them with a severe mental illness.
But one of the problems these people often have is finding meaning in life. If you see everyone around you with a job or a family or other things your mental illness stops you from having, how do you handle it? How do you find meaning with a severe case of bipolar disorder?
You know it and I know it: living with a mental illness and being open about it can have dire consequences. And, frankly, it pisses me off. Let's look at some of the more common (exceedingly irritating) stigmas about living with a mental illness.
As someone nearing 30 years old, my book library consists almost entirely of young adult (YA) novels. I love The Hunger Games, the Ender's Game series, and I even read part of the Twilight saga. It seems to be quite in line with popular culture to be reading YA books right now. With the stories of so many young adults running around in my head (and maybe in yours, too), you'd think there'd be some ADHD kiddos floating around. There wasn't until I picked up Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief in audiobook.
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.