Blogs
It can be challenging to stay grounded in the present moment when you live with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Unstable emotional states and anxious thoughts can often pull you into a past or future mindset. However, bringing yourself back into the present can have a wealth of benefits for your mental health.
I was diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1999 after a psychotic episode at college. My first diagnosis of a serious mental illness markedly changed my sense of fashion, and the changes stuck even with a later reassessment that I was schizoaffective. I have a few ideas as to why.
The stories we tell ourselves can often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Using creative writing for self-harm recovery is one way to rewrite the narrative of your life in a way that can affect real, positive change.
Keeping a child mentally healthy can be challenging, especially if your child has a mental illness as mine does. In fact, I think it can be harder than keeping a child physically healthy since keeping the body in shape basically involves a checklist: good diet, check; lots of exercise, check; plenty of water, check; annual checkup, check. A child's mental health, though, can be a bit more complicated.
Struggling with anxiety means often experiencing symptoms unexpectedly, so compartmentalizing anxiety can help. Life does not stop when you experience anxiety. The day goes on, you still have to go to work, go to school, tend to your family, and all of this does not stop when you feel anxious. However, there are coping strategies you can use to help you manage chronic anxiety on a daily basis when you know that life goes on and it is important to focus on the present. During times that this has occurred for me, I have found that it has been helpful for me to compartmentalize my anxious thoughts and feelings.
Juliana Sabatello
When we aren't at our best emotionally, it can help on a nervous system level to just have someone be with us to co-regulate our emotions. I was definitely one of those children who needed a hug when I was upset. I have always responded strongly to the negative and positive emotions of others. I also respond very well to a calm person comforting me when I am anxious or stressed. I work mostly with children, so I am used to hearing the term "co-regulation" as it relates to parents and caregivers helping children calm down when they are upset, but it can be just as powerful for adults in relationships.
When you're going through postpartum depression, it can feel like you're lost. It's as if you're seeking mental health through an endless maze of treatment, setbacks, and obstacles. Knowing how to treat your postpartum depression is a big step. When it comes to treatment, I firmly believe in using everything at your disposal. I am all for talk therapy and medication. In fact, I used both of those avenues in my treatment. However, that doesn't mean those are the only two ways you can treat postpartum depression. I found that there were several natural methods that helped me feel better and have more good days.
Suicide is a very real and prevalent issue for individuals of any age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status. It can be more widespread in some locations or groups, but anyone can fall victim to suicidal thoughts, including individuals who suffer from verbal abuse.
Picture this: you are at a social event and having a reasonably good time. Then, someone you don't know walks up to you, and after some small talk, asks you, "So what do you do for a living?" If you like your job or don't care much about it, this question can be mildly irritating. But since you are used to it, you answer and move on to another topic. However, no matter how common this question is, nothing changes the fact that it is inappropriate to ask people what they do. Let's see why.
Around this time last year, I was in serious need of a social media detox because doom-scrolling on Facebook and Instagram had monopolized most of my free time and sabotaged my mental health. This habit morphed me into someone who was constantly anxious, irritable, tense, and frantic. I could not seem to redirect my thoughts from the vitriol that spewed in the comment sections on my newsfeed, so to regain some measure of control, I turned to a familiar distraction: my eating disorder.
Love gets twisted and distorted. Relationships, without therapy and intervention get twisted too. If your parents and siblings could do these things to you, how on earth can one trust friends and new acquaintances. Some of us drown ourselves in addictions to sex, food, drugs and drama. Drama is what our brains recall more often than good memories, those are the PTSD triggers that come with a car backfiring to a gentle breeze scented with something that triggers a memory. Good turns bad and bad feels worse.
Me, i finally went no contact with my family. It was too impossible for me to even grab hold of therapeutic options while engaged with an abusive dismissive family. I too was abusive defending myself constantly, someone had to "give" , it had to be me. I had to give myself a break, I had to take a lot of time redefining myself. I never had a clue who i was or could be. Although I was a crisis counselor, surprise surprise, I went into the help field but not for me back then but to understand and fix my family. That did not work. I had to finally do it for me, and I and you deserve to be heard, understood, valued and parented.
Now I work on re parenting myself, redefining my desired self, taking some of the good I recall and mingling it with hope for the future. I write a lot of political editorials, now I am working on a website to help people find super affordable ways to have a home environment look and feel like their "Home" not our parents or siblings or some famous person's pristine decoration . My life is not on a path to decorate my home but to make it feel homey for my body and my interests. I don't want or have tons of cash so i find creative ways to refinish thrown away furniture, (I might consider it is myself that is being refinished symbolically) .
My suggestion, take your time, if people are not supportive or helpful and are in fact destructive to how you wish to feel and be, cut them loose. You don't need to serve them Turkey and Pie on Thanksgiving day as a reward for abusing you. I am inviting some older women to my holidays this year, I m calling it orphan holdiay, to everyone in my area who is orphaned by death or by necessity to save your sanity. I read about it in an article recently so am going to take a leap of faith it will be a good idea and have a reasonable outcome.
To everyone suffering from Complex PTSD or PTSD. You never deserved the trauma in the first place and you still don't. Be kind to yourself, I mean extra extra kind. It is brutal this road to healing but with it comes lots of wins, lots of progress and those who diminish your burdens of pain, don't really deserve you. You deserve so much more. Don't we all?
P.S. love the article!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5260135/
A couple years later, she offered to pay for a plane ticket for me to visit her. Needless to say, I never visited her again! [Later on "Family Feud," they had a question: What DOG commands, when given to a PERSON, would make you MOST ANGRY? I got 2 of them right!!!]
Have you ever heard of a mother doing something this crummy to an adult daughter, when she knows she has an audience? At the time, I was 52 and she was 77. She died last year at age 93, without ever having dementia, so there was literally NO EXCUSE for this behavior.