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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 writings here as well. Here is this weekend’s prompt:
Write the phrase “The Healing has begun.” and then describe yourself as if you are farther along in a recovery or healing process than you feel you are in the present moment. Imagine how you look, feel, act, talk, and relate to others. What would you be doing that you don’t do now? How would your life be different, if at all? Visualize this future self as a definite possibility for you as you continue along your healing journey. Write as your future self and encourage your present self to keep moving forward and to not to give up because things do get better, as your future self would know.
You can also follow responses to this prompt on our Facebook page.
I imagine a lead pipe boring into my flesh;
poking holes through my forearm, releasing pressure
from a body filled with tightly wound springs.
Boing! Boing!
These notions float from a subconscious stream,
and hover in the haze under black weeping willows where
the Reaper’s whispers chill my neck.
I feel the flick of his iced tongue behind my ear;
his hand on my bare back, sliding around my waist
bringing me closer, into his arms and against his skeletal frame.
The water begins by sipping my feet,
and then slowly swallows my legs before
finally, submerging my torso. And I
sleep ‘til morn.
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 on your blog and then sharing the link to your post in the comment section below. Please visit those who share their writings here as well. Here is this weekend’s prompt:
You are not the same person that you were 5 years ago. We all change. Think about in what ways you have changed, as a person, over the past 5 years. How did those changes in you come about? How have they affected your relationships with others? How have they impacted your quality of life? End your writing by focusing on the positive changes you have seen in yourself.
When I have a stressful event coming up, such as a holiday, a trip, or out-of-town company coming to visit, I usually spend the days leading up to it preparing myself physically and mentally by scheduling very light, easy days. I make sure not to book any doctor’s appointments or other trips too far away from home. I make sure to get plenty of rest, and may even get a massage. I leave plenty of time to clean my house, pack, or prepare meals for the event, or whatever may need to be done; always asking for help from others, and always doing a little each day and not all at one time or at the last-minute.
Well, this weekend we are going out-of-town for a stressful social event, and due to circumstances out of my control and to prior commitments made I have major plans every day this week, leaving me not one day to rest my body and mind in preparation for our trip. Because of this my anxiety level is through the roof!
My anxiety plays out in funny ways. It makes me a bit hypomanic. I can’t sleep. I become obsessed with cleaning and organizing my environment, as if by making my surroundings perfect I will somehow feel more put together on the inside, too. I become irritable and agitated; I start eating poorly, and I get headaches.
I suppose I could go through the rest of the week like this OR I could S.T.O.P.
I tend to “run away” from uncomfortable feelings like fear. I used to run from them by abusing alcohol. Now, I become too busy cleaning or shopping or doing things for the kids to pay attention to my feelings, and become just as sick as when I used to drink, only you could call it an “emotional hangover” instead of a physical one.
I find that when I am able to take a conscious moment to be quiet, breathe, acknowledge what I am feeling, and allow myself to feel it, the feelings lessen, if not dissipate all together. It is when I ignore them, run away from them, or fight them that they become more intense, and sometimes unbearable.
How about you?
The feeling comes on like words
on the tip of my tongue;
like standing at the edge of a cliff,
toes hanging over, watching the surf
crash into the reef 200 feet down.
Push just a little further.
It is right there.
Something important,
exciting, significant,
just out of reach.
What is it?
I feel the brush of its fingertips
on my out stretched hand
as I fall forward through the air,
descending,
descending;
hoping to wake up
before I hit the rocks below.
For several years I wrote poetry every day, feverishly. I felt like I would explode if I didn’t write the words in my brain. It was as if I was taken over by a force outside of myself, and what I ended up writing was as much as a surprise to me as it would have been to a stranger reading it. Exciting and energizing are the best words to describe the experience of writing poetry for me.
I loss the ability to access this side of my creativity about a year ago. It coincided with the time I started a new antipsychotic medication for my anxiety. I don’t know for sure if my creativity block has to do with the medication, but I strongly suspect it does.
I also experienced large amounts of emotional healing during that year, which may have contributed to the end of my drive to write poetry as well, since I wrote mostly when in emotional pain. Either way, I miss the rush of the flow of language spilling forth in a flurry, seemingly without effort on my part.
Below is a poem I wrote this week reflecting these feelings.
Fractured, a mind splintered
like a web-cracked windshield –
rock hit in the brain, dead center
or somewhere.
They never know where.
Will they ever? Neuro-
transmitter here, neuro-
transmitter there. A game
of hide and seek. Medication
roulette. Gambling while
drinking cocktails before bed
in hopes of getting
some fake sleep.
Thoughts that used to flow fluidly
down a single stream now,
split into multiple chasms;
fall into the abyss, trail off
out of creativity’s reach.
Has a psych medication ever caused you to lose your creative edge?
I don’t know about you, but I have been recovering from the holidays for the past two weeks. This has included dealing with a wide range of emotions from severe anxiety to a touch of depression to a bit of elation, and four migraines. Ouch!
I handled the actual holiday days well thanks to good self-care during the weeks prior and to anxiety meds on the days of. What surprised me was how anxious I felt on the days that followed. I lay in bed for two days after Christmas filled with panic and stress, and couldn’t believe it, because all the stressful stuff was over. Then I found this great article on what the author calls “post holiday hangover.” She describes it as “a psychologically tired and bloated feeling resulting from excess of seemingly everything.” This is exactly what I was experiencing.
She suggested doing an “emotional cleanse” to help deal with this type of hangover. An emotional cleanse includes ramping up on self-care, letting go of the self-critic, accepting that everything is as it should be, organizing and cleaning your surroundings, acknowledging your feelings and then letting them go, letting go of resentments and negativity of the past year.
I recommend reading the full article by Joyce Marter here. How are your post holiday days going? Happy New Year!
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Write into the Light 