Blogs
For me, psychosis involves auditory hallucinations (hearing voices and sounds) and is the most dangerous part of my illness. The last time I went to the emergency room for symptoms of psychosis, the doctor asked me if I heard voices, and when I answered that I was, he asked an important question, "Do you do what the voices tell you to do?" And unfortunately, my answer was yes. If you can't immediately see the danger in this scenario, try to think of it this way, imagine taking orders from something that is not real. It's alarming. Schizophrenia, voices, combined with suicidal ideation, is even more alarming.
If you're a single person with bipolar disorder, surviving can be hard. Last time I outlined why this is in a piece about being alone with bipolar disorder, but this time, I'm focusing on successfully dealing with being a single person with bipolar disorder.
I’m Sammi Caramela, and I’m excited to join HealthyPlace as the new author of "Trauma! A PTSD Blog." I’ve lived most of my life in survival mode, but it wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I realized I was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from early childhood trauma. Learning why I was suffering was crucial to healing from the extreme anxiety and depression I coped with on a regular basis.
Because I grew up with the label "shy" instead of "anxious," there are a lot of things I didn’t realize I do because of anxiety, and no one ever recognized them as anxious behaviors. It took me reading about them somewhere else or hearing someone else say them for the lightbulb to go off about my anxious behaviors.
Fear is an emotion I used to view in a negative light. However, understanding how fear influences my emotional state has helped me to harness its power and use it to my advantage. In certain situations, overcoming fear helps me achieve my goals, contributing to feelings of accomplishment, happiness, and a more vibrant life experience.
Two weeks ago, I embarked on a massive life change in sobriety. Moving away from the town where I got sober to begin a new chapter flipped my world upside down. I had to face my fear of change and part ways with the people, places, and things that kept me grounded for three years. My comfort zone was demolished, forcing me to start afresh.
Yesterday, I noticed an eyelash on my finger. I asked my husband Tom if wishing on eyelashes amounted to magical thinking, even though I already knew it did. I just wiped the eyelash away instead of wishing on it. I am trying to stop most forms of magical thinking.
I have learned so many important lessons and revelations in the course of my interminable healing from anorexia, but one stands out above the others: I cannot take a day off from eating disorder (ED) recovery. Sometimes I want to, of course. Sometimes I'm convinced that enough time has passed since my life was at risk—or I have enough experience and self-awareness at this point—to ease off the accelerator and simply coast for a while. But I really can't take a day off from ED recovery.
Last time, I wrote about setting goals and using tasks to focus on to help channel my anxiety. But what happens when things get less busy in my life, and it is time to relax? How do I relax when you're anxious?
I live alone with bipolar disorder, and recently, someone asked me how I do it. I have rarely thought about such a thing as we all just work with the life with have, but let's talk about how I survive as a person living alone with bipolar disorder.
No one is perfect so stop trying to be, another one is if you hold anger against your parents, other family members, friends etc for a past issue that happened your need to regardless of what it is, you need to forgive them for it and in saying that you don’t go looking for an apology from them because you might not get it you forgive them within yourself because that’s the result you need.
You need to learn to laugh at yourself with any fault you believe you have because once again at the end of the day they are worthless things to hold over yourself.
Picture yourself as a old person not far from your time in this life/world to live and truly think about this
- have you wasted the one life we get worrying about pointless things that happened and enjoy this experience of life.
Go through you individual anxiety fueled mental battles and forgive yourself or others and forget about that problem forever because they really only are: LIFE LESSONS to remind yourself to not do that again.
And got rid of all those problems, i no longer have what I called my Anxiety Alarm Clock every time my head hit my pillow to go to sleep at night.
I also reminded myself that anxiety and depression owned half my life and I WAS GOING TO OWN THE NEXT HALF.
If you start to feel a panic attack coming and this took time to get it to work, slow your breathing right down and same amount of time breathing in then out keeping the same pace, if you drift off back into worthless thoughts go back to breathing slowly in and out, it about changing your triggers.
And the day he snapped his fingers to get my. attention was the day I k ew I had to end it.