Blogs
Have you ever experienced a restlessness that goes beyond restlessness? Perhaps you've felt at times as though you were going to explode out of your own skin. Maybe your anxiety has sometimes completely prevented you from relaxing no matter what you do to bring a sense of tranquillity. When calming activities agitate rather than soothe, do the opposite: take action, repetitively.
Hi, my name is Lauren Hardy and I have a Master of Arts in counseling psychology, with a concentration in mental health. I have worked as a mental health counselor in a variety of different settings providing counseling services to clients of all ages and a wide variety of diagnoses. Additionally, I have over two years of experience in the treatment field as a research analyst at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. With my years of experience in the mental health field and hours I have put in as a researcher, I am able to give insight into the difficulties surrounding psychiatric disorders and the treatment process.
A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Show did a piece about Vietnam vets getting denied benefits from the Veteran’s Administration (VA). As usual, The Daily Show piece was irreverent and fun, but like so many of the show’s pieces, it, unfortunately, contained many truthful elements.
It is true that Vietnam veterans with combat PTSD wrongly get denied benefits and it is a travesty. (See The Daily Show clip, below.)
I hope you'll stop me if you've heard this story before. It might be true, then again it might not be. I am, as you are almost certainly aware, in the habit of making things up.
Like so many people who are creative for a livelihood, there comes a point when I am no longer able to distinguish between what I have made up, what I am claiming to have made up but in fact have not, what I don't know if I’ve made up or not, and what I absolutely know to be true, to the extent it is ever possible to be certain something is true, which it isn't. But enough about my methods.
You probably have someone in mind right now. Learn how to stop attracting mean people into your life and build your self-esteem.
We, as schizophrenics, must band together to form our own culture, art and way of life. We need to be recognized as a people who have a unique perspective to offer this world. Even a disability as debilitating as schizophrenia can have strengths built into its terrible nature. With the advent of medication and advanced treatment we are capable of forming our own ideas, opinion and voice that can strengthen us as a disabled people.
While PTSD recovery spans a slew of areas and requires many choices and actions; I’m always looking for ways to chunk down the work so that it’s more manageable. Recently, I spoke with trauma expert (and survivor of childhood sexual abuse) Bill O’Hanlon about his ideas for three simple ways to help you thrive after trauma.
While you will have your own unique healing timeline, O’Hanlon suggests powerful areas to develop that will both deepen your healing and strengthen your ability to move forward. In sharing the general concepts I’m adding my spin to their definitions so that you can conceptualize the ideas, imagine applying them to your healing process and have some simple steps to get you started.
I’m sick. I’ve been sick for five days. I’ve been sick and really annoyed about being sick for five days. Writers do not get paid for sick days. (And speakers have to cancel talks. Darn it.)
And while I’ve said before that it's unfair that people with bipolar disorder should have to go through normal annoyances like colds and flus, it seems that the universe begs to differ with me on that one. And so some kind of virus I have gotten.
But I think that bipolar interacts with your average bug and you average bug interacts with bipolar disorder, so how do you deal with that?
Last week, I wrote about my experiences with an abusive church. To be honest, I don't know how I survived the mass abandonment that happened when I left. But I do know that it is possible to recover from the pain of religious and spiritual abuse. Here are some steps toward healing.
Advocating for your special needs child is challenging for many reasons. Some of the parents that I work with have great difficulty with stepping out of their comfort zones to get the best services for their children. One parent I worked with in the past was so anxious that she had trouble seeing that she had the power to make decisions for her son’s well-being. So, I thought of tips for parents on how to advocate for their children.
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.