This weekend’s prompt is to write the longest gratitude list you possibly can. Add to it all weekend. Tell me how many things are on your list come Monday.
Daily Meditation – Fear Not
Fear can dominate our lives. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the past. Fear of the future. Fear of all that is, of all that isn’t. It is an agonizing state in which to live. It is a state of mind, not a state of reality, in most cases.
If we can train ourselves to stay in the present moment, in the moment of what task is at hand, then fear cannot survive. What are you doing right this moment? Reading this meditation perhaps. What fear is there in this task? When you are making your bed, doing your dishes, taking your shower, what fear is there in that? None. It is the thoughts you have outside of those actions that cause you fear.
Keeping our minds focused on exactly what we are doing in the moment can eliminate much of the fear in our lives. It is not easy, but it is simple. It is worth striving for if only to gain a little peace in our day, minute by minute.
Daily Meditation – The Present Moment
Life sometimes seems life a series of accidents, like things are spinning out of control. Scary, anxiety-producing, unknown. It can cause us to freeze in our tracks like a deer in headlights, just waiting for the impact take us out. Rarely does this ever happen. Our fears build up scenarios in our heads that make things more unbearable than they really need to be.
If only we could take a moment to stop our thoughts and concentrate on our breathing. Take a deep breath. Do the next right thing. Take it one step at a time. Have faith that if we only take care of what is in front of us – whether it be a daily task, a job responsibility, a self-care activity, a social commitment – the future will take care of itself.
For the future is never with us, only the present moment is. It is only in the present moment where we can take the actions that will make a difference in our quality of life. It is only in the present moment where we can find peace.
Weekend Mental Health Writing Prompt – Fantastic Things
For this weekend’s writing prompt read my meditation post here and write about five fantastic things that happened in your life this past week.
Write your response in your journal at home, in the comments below, or on your blog and feel free to post the link to your blog post in the comments below. Thanks for participating and have a fantastic weekend!
Daily Meditation – Fantastic Things
Life can often seem so mundane. We drag ourselves out of bed to carry on the same old routine day after day after day. When will it ever end? When will something exciting and new come our way?
What we don’t realize is that it is our own mind that makes these tasks boring and unassuming. It is our own preconceived ideas and unconscious conditioning of going through life without gratitude for what we have, what we are capable of doing.
Did you know that in most places in the world there are no indoor toilets? People go in the streets, in front of everyone else! Did you know that millions die of starvation each year? Many do not have running water for drinking or bathing.
Today, let us do something fantastic for ourselves. Take a warm shower, eat a meal, flush a toilet, visit a friend, brush your teeth. Be grateful for every little thing that you can do, for every little thing that is available to you. These are fantastic things! Things which are hard for us with mental illness to do at times – to eat, bathe, groom, socialize – but nonetheless, fantastic. Rejoice and delight in this fact.
Daily Meditation – The Sum of Our Recovery
We spend so much time and effort on our recovery, and some days, it seems as though there is little pay off. What is it all worth? Has it really made a difference? And then we look back over the months and years and we see that, yes, it has made a difference. We are further along than we were.
One plus one equals two. Life is more complex than such a simple equation, but does it have to be? If we take each simple action as an accomplishment, it can become as simple as the “1” in the equation of one plus one, and our daily activities will add up into something grand. Even something as simple as sitting up in bed in the morning and putting our feet to the floor can be considered an accomplishment, for it is healthier than laying there all day!
We must give ourselves credit for every little thing we do. Let us not take for granted each step we take toward recovery, for it is all the one plus ones that add up to the sum of our well-being.
Daily Meditation – The Greatest Gift
When the cold of depression surrounds my heart with ice, and I shiver under the blankets in my lonely bed, it feels as though I will suffer alone forever with the silent screams of the voices in my unquiet mind. If only for a moment to feel the healing touch of God, to feel the warmth of his hands melt the chill of despair that suffocates my soul – oh, how lovely this would be!
At times, it feels as if our despondent mood will last forever, but like the tides of the ocean, the ebb and flow of life and its accompanying emotions are never stagnant. What is today will not necessarily be tomorrow. With every breath is the promise of new and different possibilities.
Hanging onto the hope of a better tomorrow is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves. Taking the necessary steps to facilitate such an outcome is what we are called to do. We alone are responsible for taking care of ourselves, our health, our own well-being. We must not wait for someone else to take charge of our lives. We must take even the smallest of steps to begin to make the changes in our lives to become the person we were meant to be, to heal if only a little at a time; to try if only in some small way every day.
Flash of Depression – a poem
The clock tick tocks,
pounding lines in my face;
breathing yesterdays gone;
inhaling tomorrows soon to be forgotten.
Where do I go
when there’s nothing left to do?
From whom do I receive
my final instructions?
Each second pricks my skin
again and again.
Eternity is my tattoo,
and I writhe in pain.
Weekend Mental Health Writings – It’s Good to Know Me
Each weekend I am going to post a mental health writing prompt. Feel free to participate by writing your response privately in your own journal at home, or by posting your response in the comments below, or by posting on your own blog and then sharing the link to your post in the comment section. Please visit those who share their links here as well. Here is this weekend’s prompt:
Name two people whose lives have been improved by knowing you and explain why.
You can also follow responses to this prompt on our Facebook page.
Motherhood and Borderline Bipolar
I am a mother, and I have bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder (BPD) traits, meaning I have some but not all of the criteria needed to meet the diagnosis for BPD. Two years ago, my life was changed due to learning the skills taught through Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). Below is part of my story which was originally published at Healing from BPD.org.
What it used to Be Like
I bee lined down the hall into the bathroom, and shut and locked the door behind me before falling to my knees. Covering my face with my hands, I sobbed. Outside, my two and six-year-old girls banged on the door. “Moooommy! Moooommmyyy!” I thought, “Oh, my God! Why can’t they just leave me alone?”
I dialed a friend’s number and when she answered I cried, “I can’t do this. I can’t be a mom. I don’t know what I am doing. It’s too much. I can’t do this!” She calmly asked me what was wrong. I babbled through snot and tears, “One won’t eat her dinner, the other one always needs her diaper changed, they are fighting over toys, the Disney channel is driving me insane, and of course my husband is working all night again!” I was spiraling out of emotional control…over every day, typical motherhood stuff.
That was six years ago – four years before I would be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD.) On many occasions, my husband would have to come home from work to calm me down during times like this. Feelings of inadequacy, fear of harming my children or myself, anger, self-pity, gripping anxiety, immobilizing depression and loneliness were my constant companions.
The unpredictability of the children’s behaviors and moods, and my inability to set boundaries and provide structure in my own life, let alone theirs, only heightened my anxiety. I was permanently in fight or flight mode – instincts gone haywire. I was filled with self-doubt and self-hatred. I felt like a caged animal ready to chew off its own foot to escape the chains shackling it to the cold and filthy floor.
Then I learned (in Dialectic Behavioral Therapy – DBT) that this chaotic environment, in which I felt like a prisoner, was imitative of my own childhood home. Sure, I wasn’t walking around drunk all of the time like my parents, but the moodiness, anger, and self-absorption that consumed me were not much different from theirs. Also like them, I had no real sense of how to be a parent.
Everyday interactions with my children baffled me and left me reeling in emotional binges filled with terror like when I was a child. I felt as if I lived in a carnival fun house filled with mirrors that distorted my view of the entire world while everyone else had regular old mirrors to look at. In hindsight, this was closer to the truth than I realized at the time.
The Turning Point
I was already being treated for alcoholism and bipolar and anxiety disorders when my psychiatrist suggested that I might have BPD as well. My first response was, “Great, another fricking diagnosis!” What I didn’t know, however, is that being diagnosed with BPD would be the best thing to ever happen to me and for my mental health recovery. For if I was never diagnosed with BPD, I may have never sought out DBT, which did for me in one year what years and years of individual and group therapies based on other psychological theories could never begin to do.
What it is Like Now
In DBT I learned how to be mindful of and radically accept my limitations as a highly emotionally sensitive person and mother. For example, this past spring I was beating myself up over not being emotionally balanced enough to take my children to church on Easter. The old me would have ignored my high anxiety levels and begrudgingly gotten them ready while screaming at them to, “Hurry up. Do this. Don’t do that!”
Then I would have suffered through the service feeling like a martyr while becoming angrier by the minute. Or I would have had a panic attack and then drove us all back home in a dangerous state of mind. Then I would have spent the rest of the day in bed, completely abandoning the kids to the television and their own devices. And let’s not forget the verbal hell my husband would have received for having to go to work, thereby leaving me to deal with the children alone, and on a holiday at that!
Instead I sat back and observed my thoughts and feelings as if I was watching another person go through them. I acknowledged the guilt and anxiety rather than fighting them. I also consciously did not make them who I was, but chose to view them as an experience of something separate within me. I chose to believe that deep down all was ok – that I was ok – no matter what thoughts and feelings occurred in my mind. I also made special care not to judge my thoughts and feelings as good or bad. The just were there or they were not…period.
Later that morning, I found an Easter service streaming live online, and my girls and I worshiped along with them from the comforts of our family room. It was a blessed day in which I owed no apologies at the end, neither to my kids or my husband, and most importantly, to myself.
What is it like for you as a mother with BPD? Or if you are the child of a mother with BPD, what is that like? What are some positive aspects of being a highly emotionally sensitive mother?
Write into the Light 