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It being the end of the year, everyone makes New Year's resolutions. Typically, people want to lose weight or make more money. Maybe they hope to change their lifestyle or start a family. These are resolutions that are heard over-and-over again and sadly, after January, a lot of these New Year's resolutions are pushed aside.
You know, as well as I do, that if you’re someone trying to stop your self-harm, your resolution will probably be to stop hurting yourself for good in 2014.
But will you be able to do it?
Do you have a child with mental illness? Sometimes, receiving inquiries from others about your child's mental health situation can catch you off-guard or be awkward.
One of the biggest problems in my PTSD experience and my recovery from PTSD was how fragmented I was and felt. Do you know what I mean?
It seemed like I had slivers of memories, a shattered sense of self and random sprinkles of what it meant to live a healthy, 'normal' life.
Healing PTSD, to me, became finding a way to pull everything back together. It meant re-integrating who I had been with who I had become, with who I wanted to be. (PTSD and Integration: The Path To Healing) Whew, that was a big job! And back then, I didn't have the benefit of Dr. Daniel Siegel's input - but you can!
Noise sensitivity can be likened to nails on a blackboard. The constant buzz and whir of music, technology, the buzzing of Facebook notifications, ringing phones and loud conversations can be overwhelming. This sensitivity to noise is known as hyperacusis, a condition that arises from a problem in the way the brain processes noise.
Being thankful in eating disorder recovery is not always easy and, sometimes, it's nearly impossible to find a reason to be thankful. Thankful that I'm still alive? Sure, but there have been days that breathing has seemed more of a curse than a blessing. Thankful for family? Oh, you mean those jerks who shipped me to an eating disorder treatment center halfway across the country and wouldn't let me come home? So thankful for them. (Sorry, Mom and Dad! But this was definitely a thought of mine.) But usually, if you look closely enough, you will find a lot of reasons to be thankful in eating disorder recovery.
A brand new year is almost upon us. It’s a time for inward reflection and taking charge of our renewal. This is an excellent time for reflecting upon and resolving to take charge of anxiety. In my own reflecting, I thought of ten resolutions for regaining power from the beast that is anxiety. I don’t like to think of them as New Year’s resolutions, for New Year’s resolutions are notorious for being broken. I like to think of them as “New Me” resolutions. Perhaps you might want to resolve to do some of these as you take charge of your own anxiety.
Realistic New Year's resolutions remove some of the fear of failure that can go along with goal-setting. I have never liked New Year's resolutions because the idea of abandoning an old habit that was making me feel good or serving my life in some way didn't seem logical. If it is something I have been doing for months or years, could I just nix it from my life overnight? It's a set up for failure.
We have conditioned ourselves to want and need particular habits we have formed. Instead of swearing off your favorite foods, which your brain has been conditioned to love, or going to the gym 7 days a week, which your body and brain have no idea how to do yet, set some realistic New Year resolutions that make sense.
The beginning of my PTSD recovery looked like this:
Force me to go to therapy for one hour, once a week.
I show up and expect the therapist to do all of the work.
For the rest of the week, I pretend there’s nothing else to do and just try to limp through the days coping with symptoms of PTSD.
Why did I pretend there was nothing else to do? Because if you’ve ever, for a second, struggled with the effects of trauma or PTSD, you know what it feels like to be sleep-deprived, depressed, emotionally volatile, powerless, hopeless and sometimes, just downright utterly despondent. In that state of mind, I often believed there was no way to save me. I was crazy and would remain so forever.
Surviving abuse feels like a miracle. Over all, surviving my abusive marriage has been a wonderful, empowering experience. However, my recovery from domestic abuse hasn't gone exactly as I thought it would. Some things have been downright crappy. This year, the happiness of surviving abuse is diminishing. The crappy is beginning to outweigh the happy. Surviving abuse is a beautiful accomplishment. Surviving recovery . . . well that's what this story is about.
I'll be honest, I'm not in the proverbial "Christmas Spirit". Things have been rough lately. I got challenged to a fistfight (When Violence Accompanies Mental Illness), my 2-year-old niece had surgery, my neighbor died and I lost one of my jobs. That's a lot to get hit with during an ordinary time of year, but around Christmas... Well, it taught me that Christmas is not always a joyous time of year for everyone. And that's okay.
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.