RealMental

I was talking to my therapist about various things during our last session, and one of them was how much better I feel for having started writing again.  She knows that I blog and that I keep my journal.  I’m not sure if she reads my personal blog or this one– I suppose telling her about them keeps me honest.  I was also showing her a poetry series that I was working on, since some of it had to do with other things we were talking about.  She handed my journal back to me and said something simple but perspective-altering– “what a relief to recover something you used to do for pleasure.”

When I think of how many pink cloth diaries and wire-bound notebooks and scratch pads I used to fill with bad poetry, stories, rantings to myself, and every other musing, prosaic and poetic when I was an adolescent and teen… all I can say is I did it because I enjoyed it.  It gave me relief.  I wasn’t sharing what I wrote (and it was before the internet, anyway) or expecting criticism– I just wrote for my Self.  And I just . . . stopped, lost that part of myself with my first really bad depression in college.  I didn’t recover my writing in any consistent fashion until after my diagnosis in 2005.

I’ve always let peter out things I really enjoyed when I entered a bad depression.  As depression’s lead blanket would descend, causing me to lose my joy in life, and as my insecurities would foster a deeper depression, I would become convinced I didn’t deserve happiness, and would withdraw from life.  I would withdraw from, or even sabotage friendships.  I would stay in my dark bedroom all day.  I would let the phone ring and ring and ring.  And I would let the thoughts circle around, in ever-tightening spirals in my mind, until it was impossible to break out of the vortex until my brain chemistry righted itself.  But now, I know more about the whys and hows of my depression, and am slowly getting better about seeing the black cloud on the horizon.  I know now that if I allow myself to back away from all the things I enjoy, then it’ll be worse than if I just grit my teeth and at least go through the motions. The activity itself is therapeutic.  So now, I resolve to do the things I used to do for pleasure, whether I feel like it or not.  I think that “practice makes perfect” has especial meaning when depression is keeping you pinned to your bed.

Write every day, for the release, for getting the circling thoughts out of my head.  Get out in the sunshine every day, because the secret to bipolars is that we are all part plant and part cat, and need sunshine to stay sane.  Meditate every day and do yoga three times a week, so I can let go of some of the circling thoughts that don’t really require writing out.  Call a far-away friend once a week, and ask them about what’s going on with them.  Have lunch or dinner with a friend at least once, preferably twice a week, because I have good friends, who care, who make me laugh, who deserve my attention.  And try not to forget the things I like to do for fun, because the only thing better than the relief of recovering that joy is never really having lost it.

Not sure when it happened, or how it happened. At some point, in between the abuse I experienced as a child, and becoming an adult, I made a promise to myself that I would make the world a safer place for children.

I didn’t remember that vague whisper of the promise I made until I was a few years into being a step parent. Most of my life, kids have always liked me. I would dare to tell you that my measure of worth as a person could be determined on whether or not a child thought well of me.

This is precisely why my experience with my step daughter brought me to my knees. I was ashamed of myself as an adult, as a parent. I was doing it all wrong. I was stuck in a vicious cycle of bad parenting when my only desire was to do right by her.

I was trying desperately trying to do THE RIGHT THING.

I wanted to change quickly, I wanted to improve yesterday. If I could just finding the fucking key, the source, and the exact nature of the wrong then I would be ok. We would be ok.

Finally, the tides began turning; I started doing small things within myself to change. The biggest change, that served me, was that I had to stop trying to fix her, and I had to start taking better care of myself.

We talked, and talked and talked. I had to force myself not to ask her if she was ok even though I could feel her pain, her sorrow. I made amends to her. I thanked her for being such a good teacher.

It’s taken time for the healing to show results, but the results have surfaced. The results are there. She knows without any doubt that I would take a bullet for her.

By loving her, hidden doorways within me revealed themselves, and bridges were crossed that may have otherwise fallen down. We are bonded, that one and I. She is the sun, the moon, and the stars and I love her deeply.  She helped me keep the promise.

So apparently having Dr. Phil barge into your hospitalization is a bad idea.

Having Dr. Phil anywhere in the world where women can hear him? Bad idea. Put him somewhere distant and cavernous.

Having him personally up in your grill? Even worse.

Having him discuss your case with the media? What the fuck is that? HIPPA, dude!

I’m a counselor. A Licensed Clinical Social Worker, to be exact. That means I’ve gone to four years of college, two years of graduate school, and learned to the limits of my ability the best our science has to offer about how to help people be mentally healthy. It also means that I’ve worked under a seasoned professional for two years and proven myself worthy to be able to give others therapy.

But what it DOESN’T mean is that when a precious and complicated human being (and each human being is incredibly precious and incredibly complicated) comes to visit me that I know what is best for her, in her complicated life, right now. That’s why I don’t really like to call myself a counselor. I don’t like giving counsel, or advice, very much. I might offer a few things to think about, or even give some suggestions. I might give some homework of a skill to try or a book to read, but I’ll really try hard not to take control or tell her how to live her life (unless she’s a danger to someone).

So let’s not call me a counselor. And let’s not call me a therapist either. That word is easily broken into two words that cause many people to feel apprehension when their mental state is already compromised. And psychotherapist is just that much worse. Probably the best name for me is a mental health provider, but that’s way too long to say very often, and it also makes it sound like I’ve got some mental health that I can pull out of the air and provide for you. Which is stretching the truth by a lot. Have you noticed that I’m a mental health provider who has a professional identity problem? I don’t even know what to call myself.

Maybe this is a good time to mention that I’m just a person. With problems. My mental health provider colleagues and I are people, believe it or not, and have our own issues, hang-ups, and mental health problems. Just like every doctor gets sick sometimes, every mental health provider has days when his or her mental health is compromised. We also have ongoing, long-term issues that we struggle with over time. That’s part of being a person. On the other hand, we have some good training and we tend to have a real desire to be helpful. So if you find yourself in my office, I hope you’ll share as honestly as you can what is happening in your world, and let me share your world and your burden. And if I have a suggestion, I hope you’ll listen carefully–with a grain of salt. You hold (and should hold) the steering wheel of your life in your hands. Let me ride shotgun.

From the editor – If you have any questions for Mr. C., feel free to submit them to leah (at) leahpeah (dot) com.

Several years ago I was having a chat with a family member when they asked me about my decision to stop pursuing a career in music- what made me decide to take a more practical route. I told them that it was a hard choice, but that I’d realized that a) I was an okay musician. Not great, but fair- and that fair wasn’t going to cut it, and b) for a long time I thought, melodramatically, that music defined me as a person, that it was the essence of my being. As I got older I realized that music was something that I loved, loved doing, but that whether I played music as a profession or as a hobby I was not going to let it make me feel defeated or unhappy.

My relative looked me straight in the eye and without any conscious ill-intent said, “Well Amanda, you know Allison Krauss isn’t attractive and she has a career in music.”.

Yesterday, the same relative expressed concern that I might one day feel resentful towards my child, “Because she’s so cute and pretty.”.

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I have trained myself to listen to my inner voice and to what it’s saying to me. After about a decade of of awareness and gentle correction I have learned to pay attention to that voice, to be diligent, and ultimately to be kind to myself in thought and action. It has made a world of difference in the way that I live and the way that I feel about myself.

The greatest gift I’ve received from this practice is the realization that the voice in my head, the one that calls me names, tells me I’m not good enough- the one that is so hard and cruel- it’s not my voice. Those thoughts were placed there by other people and for a long time I let other people control the way I feel about myself.

These days, more often than not, the voice is mine. And it thinks I’m more than just okay.

A friend of our family recently disclosed to me that even though I’ve been referred to as “the crazy one” for many years in my family of origin, this person believes that I am actually more sane, or even better, healthier than the others. Me.

(The context of this comment was in no way competitive, nor meant to bring any others down. It was simply this person’s truth.)

This is what crazy people like myself long to hear, because we secretly believe it ourselves. We long to hear that all the years of therapy and talking about our feelings is going to finally pay off.

Not that I don’t have the internal fight with voices that one day tell me, “gee you are really doing well in therapy and making progress”, the next day the voices say “your family is right, you are an insolent slob of a human and you should be ashamed for even thinking you were worthy of anything”.

The crazy one in the family is the one others gang up on, and demand to know “why can’t you just be normal?”, or “why does everything bother you so much?”, “when are you going to get over it?”

If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard those comments, I’d buy myself a nice straitjacket.

I mentioned this to my therapist on my last appointment, and he confirmed that it’s actually common in family dynamics for the “crazy one” to be the healthiest. The crazy one is the one who tells the truth, and speaks up about things not being right while everyone else is busy trying to ignore the elephant.

This is similar to something that I’ve always wondered about people who talk to himself or herself, or “act crazy” in public. Perhaps, they are the normal ones, unfettered by the social slavery of “acting normal.”

After sharing this comment with my therapist, he was complimentary and praised me for the work I’ve been doing. He doesn’t offer up this type of information easily and he’s painfully honest.

I need to tell you that I felt good before my therapist expressed his opinion. This is vitally important that I feel this way about myself, whether my therapist or anyone else offers me praise or not. This is progress for me; in addition to something, that not one single person or event can take away from me.

Early on in working with this therapist, he pointed out a comment I made at the beginning of our relationship. It was “how can a person love me if I cannot love myself?” I had no idea I’d said it.

Not only said it, but I’d been LIVING it without even realizing.

I’ve heard this in one form or another “you have to love yourself before others can love you” for most of my life. I never really understood it until my therapist pointed out that I’d said it.

People have told me they love me, that I’m pretty, that I’m worthwhile, and I’ve always felt like they were lying. If they told me I was a horrible excuse for a human, I’d believe them. It was easier to believe the bad because the bad is what I’ve been telling myself for most of my life.

How I feel about myself is much more important than how any other person feels about me. This is a reminder for myself and anyone else that suffers from this disposition. The thing about these revelations is that they do not last forevermore and there I go skipping into the sunset.

As I continue to grow as a person, my crazy will weave and it will bob. That is life, that is mother nature. Each enlightenment leads to more enlightenments.

Today, I don’t feel so bad about being the crazy one.

I can honestly say that I am wearing my crazy title proudly.

I don’t have the answer to this question, but it’s one that everyone faces at one point or another in their relationships with the toxic people in their lives. I’ve been contemplating it on a number of fronts– toxic friends, toxic employment, toxic family, but it’s the last that’s the hardest, at least for me. The crazier my mother gets, the more I question what relationship I can safely have with her.

“Family” is a loaded, loaded word. The family to whom you are born may be less than ideal, and you haven’t got a choice in the cards that nature deals you in the long game of family– genetics, personalities, economic circumstances, and psychological pathologies. With friends and employment, there is always an element of choice, even if it’s a selection between a rock and a hard place. But in a family, the lack of choice is constraining. I, at least, feel like I have to try to make things work. The social belief that we owe our families our lifelong involvement and devotion, repaying the debts of our infancy and childhood to our elders is one that deserves examining.

As someone coming from an essentially middle-class background in a western civilization, I’m not equipped to opine on other cultures’ notion of a lifelong debt to family, nor am I even sure about whether that’s the best way to characterize it. But in our culture, I do believe there’s a breaking point. There are circumstances that are so horrific that we can all agree that someone has the “right,” if not in fact the self-obligation, to cut themselves off from their toxic family. But when do the circumstances suffice in our own lives? And when deciding if your family (or certain family members) are too toxic to continue to be borne, is it “fair” to make your decision based on your own reaction to their behavior, compared with the “objective” assessment of their toxic behavior?

It’s a question I’ve struggled with for years. I’ve been in therapy off and on, and at different points in my life, different behaviors have been wounding. As I get older, I’ve come to peace with the fact that it simply isn’t personal, and that the behavior is due to the mental illness and personality disorder from which she suffers. Too, I’ve mellowed as I’ve aged, and gotten a sense of tolerance if not humor about some of the craziness. But even with all that work, some of it is just too much– it hurts, every single time, and nothing I say or do to be self-protective, including standing up for myself, will change the behavior. But it doesn’t just only hurt– the stress she creates by failing/refusing/being incapable of getting appropriate medication, psychiatric treatment, and therapy pushes me down toward my depression end on the spectrum. First anger, then indignation, then self-pity, then sobbing self-pity, then apathy and wishful thinking and ignoring the problem, pushing it off onto my brother and aunt. At the same time, who better than I to help monitor her moods, get her the help she needs? I’ve already learned that she will never, never, never, change anything about her own life– her narcissism and martyr complex will see to that. But does my “responsibility” to her as a daughter to try to make her elderly stage of life livable obviate my need to take care of myself, to live my own life, to stay healthy for the husband I chose, who doesn’t engage in behaviors that literally drive me nuts?

Distancing has worked for me in the past (I don’t think she’s noticed), and more is in order. I also have decided that “plain talk” of actions and consequences is in order, whether or not she’s capable of understanding or acting on such, because she does have the capacity of being a lucid and functional person. Babying her accomplishes nothing, and is destructive to my own sanity. But the breaking point? I haven’t decided if I’ve reached that yet.