Tag: #endthestigma

Tough Days Happen

Sea Sanctuary - #Repost @positivelytherapy ・・・ Bad days happen. Tough emotions happen. Confusing thoughts happen. Some days are going to feel like a completely messy scribble. And that's ok. • • • • • • #

I work with high school students. Today, I had two students who were having anxiety attacks come to me.

One was able to use the techniques I was giving them as well as some of their own to calm down. That is great!

The other, used various techniques and could not get their breathing to slow down, their tears to stop, or their brain to stop racing. That is okay too.

Sometimes we just have a day(or a lot of days) where we can not quiet our minds. When our hearts continue to race and our thoughts spiral into places we don’t want them to go. And that’s okay.

In the long run, feeling like that is going to have physical consequences for us, but sometimes we just need to feel what we feel. We need to accept the facts of what is happening to us or around us that are making us feel this way. Eventually, if you use techniques that you have found work for you to slow everything down you can get back to normal.

Calming techniques for one person, may not work for another. That’s why it is so important to find what works for you.

Here is a website that has ideas with videos to instruct how to use each technique they present. https://www.mind.org.uk/need-urgent-help/what-can-i-do-to-help-myself-cope/relaxing-and-calming-exercises/

Many people in anxiety attacks get upset with themselves for not being able to calm down, or call themselves names for having the attack in the first place. These reactions DO NOT HELP. It’s important to accept that it happened in order to get to a calmer state. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 4% of the world’s population have an anxiety disorder, you are not alone in what you experience. You can also reach out to a therapist for help in gaining techniques and strategies for when it happens and in making your life improve over all.

Heal to Handle Joy

A friend of mine sent this image to me recently. I have no idea who to credit for it, but it is so true.

I spent most of my life hyper-vigilant, not knowing who I could trust, even myself. I often felt like there was an overwound spring, ready to break free inside of me. The anxiety often threatened to pull me under and drown me. It took a toll on my body as I am still learning to relax my overly tense muscles.

Therapy has helped me tremendously. The first few times I went, I did the work to get through the trauma of the moment. Then because of insurance, or time committment, I would end treatment with new skills and strategies for dealing with the stresses of life.

This time though, I have continued beyond the trauma of the moment and gotten to the base of my mental health issues; feeling worthless, not good enough, abandoned, alone, and dealt with them. Now, instead of always waiting for the next bad thing to happen, I believe that I will find joy.

That is a terrifying, new experience for me. I’m not saying that I haven’t been happy before, but I never trusted it, history had shown me that good times don’t last. You get your heart ripped out of your chest, cut to pieces, and left alone to put it back together again.

As I have been learning to live my authentic self, not making myself fit into a certain mold or expectation of me, I have found people who like me, and all the oddities and nerdiness that go along with me. It’s scary to be vulnerable and honest with yourself and others, but in the process, I am learning how to handle joy in my life. I’m not scared that I have to behave a certain way to keep people likeing me, they just like me.

Therapy taught me that I can be me. As a friend learned in one of her therapy appointments, I’m not for everybody and everybody isn’t for me and that’s okay. As I have embraced who I am, I have learned to find joy in acceptance, peace in solitude, and contentment with others. I no longer feel as though I am a spring ready to break free, now if I could just get my shoulders to realize that they are not responsible for keeping everything inside so they can relax…

If you need someone to talk to, I am now an Associate Marriage Family Therapist working at Share Homes Foster and Adoption Agency in Lodi, Ca. If you are in California, I can work with you. Send a message for more information.

Surviving to Thriving….

For most of my life, I have lived in survival mode. Everything was difficult when it came to interpersonal relationships. I needed to be loved and accepted and I felt like I had to earn it. I believed that I was not worth love and acceptance just for who I am. That belief has caused extensive grief for myself and unfortunately, there has been collateral damage to those closest to me.

In June 2020, I knew I couldn’t handle living in fight, flight, or freeze mode any longer and reached out to a therapist. At that point I felt like I was barely surviving. Struggling to tread water, to keep from drowning in life. That therapist, and then another one, were the flotation devices that I needed.

On a Saturday afternoon in October 2021, I was laying in bed. Getting out of bed was an unsurmountable obstacle that day. I could feel the darkness of being underwater overwhelming me, I did not have the energy to come up for air. I reached to my bedside table and grabbed my journal that was always there, waiting for me to empty the swirling thoughts in my head.

That day I wrote this in my journal:

“Spinning, swirling

Thought sprials, going nowhere,

Energy zapped, utterly exhausted,

Light evaporating, gray overshadowing,

Growing weary,

suffocating,

drowning.”

I realized I needed more help. I got on antidepressants. I started seeing my therapist weekly. I reached out to friends to hang out and talk and ask for help when I needed it.

This past week I saw my therapist (yes, I have been in therapy for three-and-a-half years.) I told him, that for the first time in my life, I feel like I am thriving. I have many things in my life to be grateful for and a lot of accomplishments, but most of them were done in an attempt to just survive this life. For example, I did well in school because I knew that an education would get me away from my parents.

At the end of January, I finished a master’s degree in psychology. This was something I did, not because it would help me survive, but because it would allow me to help others in survival mode heal so that they can thrive.

The next step for me is applying for my Associate Marriage and Family Therapist certificate, so I can start working with others on their healing journey.

Hopefully, that adorable puppy in the picture will work with me as a therapy dog.

A Long Time Coming

I have spent the past few years learning about myself. The journey truly began in the spring of 2016 with a series of Facebook posts that all started with the phrase, “You might be in an abusive or controlling relationship if…” I was writing them to help a friend who I thought was in a controlling relationship, but also to help all people who might be in that kind of relationship and not realize it. In the process, I ended up helping to finally heal myself from the abusive and controlling relationships that I experienced in my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.

Through my healing journey, I realized that I was a people pleaser. I did not even know what I truly liked in some cases, I just liked what others liked. I really like cheesy rom-com movies where you know exactly how the story is going to end. I really don’t like NASCAR, except the white noise of the engines while I take a nap. I like some sci-fi, but not others and I can’t tell you what makes me like some and not others yet, but I’ll keep watching to figure it out.

I learned that I don’t like fighting. If I think someone is mad at me and is about to start or does start a fight, I will do whatever is necessary to appease them and keep them happy. I will retreat into my shell, and ignore my wants and needs to keep the other person happy. This is not a healthy coping strategy. I am working on this.

I have learned how to say what I am feeling, what I need, and what I want without feeling like I’m asking for too much or being too needy. I learned that just because I was made to feel that asking for my needs to be met as a child was asking for too much, it is not. It is normal and necessary for humans to function.

I learned that it’s okay to ask for help; that relying on yourself from a young age because you cannot trust anyone else to help you in your time of need is not a healthy coping strategy. It means that those who should have been there to take care of you when you were younger weren’t.

I have learned a lot over the past seven years and I will continue to learn more on this healing and growth journey I am on. I will never again settle for a person because they pay attention to me, I am looking for a true partner in my future. Someone who loves me as I am. Someone who I am able to be myself with from the very beginning and able to grow and change with as I learn new things.

I am excited to be at this point in my life. I am content with where I’m at. I have great friends, a good job, and a home that I love and am totally comfortable in.

Anxiety Lies

healthyplace.com

I have anxiety and it lies to me. It knows every one of my insecurities and fears. It whispers them to me in a steady drone in the back of my head, like constant white noise. Sometimes anxiety chooses one or two of them to pick out and amplify; to scream into my mind until I can’t breath, until I can’t think of anything else, until my heart is racing as if I’m facing a life threatening moment, until I want to run away.

(I take medication that helps. Finally, my doctor and I have found a medication that helps AND now, almost a year later, hasn’t left me wanting to do nothing but sleep which is what every other medication I have tried has left me feeling. I also see a therapist, having a person to talk to has helped tremendously.)

The lies anxiety chooses to amplify focus on two topics that have a huge impact on my life: “You can’t do this.” and “They won’t like you.”

Those two lies have kept me from doing so much in my life. They have kept me hidden. They have kept me invisible, locked inside a prison of my own making. There have been people in my life that fed into the lies along with anxiety, who emotionally, physically, and sexually abused me, but it was the lies anxiety told me, and I believed, that kept me in those relationships far longer than I should have been. I couldn’t leave my parents until I was 18, but I kept them in my life much longer. The boyfriend who raped me and my first husband, I waited until they were physically away from me before I broke up with them.

I believed I couldn’t do it.

This past week, I went on a vacation specifically designed to challenge myself. I was willing to go alone, but a coworker ended up joining me, because it was one of her bucket-list travel destinations. It was amazing getting to know her better, I’m so glad she joined me on all the challenges I chose to do. She even had to do one of them herself, because of health reasons, I wasn’t allowed to participate in it.

I hiked up waterfalls, one of them was 1200 steps! There were many stops… for photos… along the way. It was never because I needed to catch my breath. Where are the photos you ask, ummmmm. I’m pretty sure the film didn’t develop on those… (HAHAHAHA.)

Skogafoss Waterfall, Iceland (the black line to the right are the steps I climbed to the top)

I walked through an ice cave, in a glacier that’s melting, on a volcano, that has never gone more than 100 years between eruptions, until now. It’s been 104 years since the last eruption. I walked over bridges made of 2X6 planks of wood, that have been chewed up by the cramp-ons that people wear on their boots to not slip on the ice with melting glacier water rushing beneath them and nothing to hold on to except the occasional rope hooked into the melting glacier wall.

Katla Ice Cave, Iceland

I met tons of new people, that I actually talked to. I didn’t listen to anxiety telling me that they wouldn’t like me. I just went for it. There I may not have learned everyone’s name, but we all did amazing things together and I will never forget them being there with me. I ate food that I NEVER thought I’d eat and it was DELICIOUS. I hope to find some of it here in California, but some of it I know I won’t. I ate fermented shark and I will never eat it again! EVER! But I did it, I got out of my comfort zone and did it! I can do hard things.

My travel buddy, our driver/guide for two days, and me at Silfra, Iceland (where two continents meet)

The next time anxiety tries to lie to me, I need to remember all the hard things I did on this trip and all the people I met. I can do this and people will like me.

The Independent One

As a little girl, my mom told me that she knew from the moment I was born that I was going to be the independent one, that I wouldn’t need her, that I would be able to take care of myself. I was in Kindergarten the first time she told me that. I thought it made me strong and mature to be able to take care of myself and my siblings from a young age. I didn’t realize I was doing it because I couldn’t depend on anyone else.

In 1980 or so, there were warnings of floods in our area that winter. Our driveway and pastures often flooded so it wasn’t too far fetched for our minds to believe our house would flood. My older sister and I made a plan to save ourselves and siblings if our house flooded. Maybe she made most of the plan, but I definitely remember being in on the conversation; I was 6 years old.

When I was 8 years old, my mom worked during the day and my teenage sister slept in until late, so I had to make sure my siblings had breakfast and lunch. Oftentimes, I also made dinner for the family. I was a genius at making Top Ramen and corn dogs. By the time I was 12, dinner was my responsibility most nights too.

As soon as I got my driver’s license I was doing the grocery shopping for the family as well as driving my siblings and my mom to all of our appointments. I was about 17 before I realized that I didn’t have a childhood.

I grew up to believe I could only depend on myself, that if I needed anything from anybody else they wouldn’t love me, that it would prove that I was weak, imperfect, worthless, and unlovable. I needed to be independent to prove I was worthwhile.

People commented on how hard I worked or how well I worked on my own. I reveled in their acknowledgment. Feeling worthy through their eyes, but never my own. I still felt like a child seeking approval, trying to show that I didn’t need anyone, that I was independent like my mom had told me so long ago.

This past year I needed help with something big. I knew I couldn’t do it alone, I was going to need many people to do it with me. It took so much for me to ask for help. After I did, I cried. One of my friends asked me why it was so hard for me to ask for help when I know they will all be there for me.

My answer, “I never knew I could rely on people before.”

I have a few people in my life I know I can count on, I’ve slept on their couches when I had nowhere else to go, they’ve helped me move, I’ve called or texted them and asked last minute if I can come see them and they say yes. In my life though, they have been the exception, not the norm.

My goal moving forward in life is to surround myself with people who I can rely on. Who when I call and they say I need your help, they say I’m on the way without even asking what they’re helping with.

Forgiveness

I grew up being told that if in order to be a “good Christian” I needed to forgive those who did wrong to me. If I wanted God to forgive me of my sins against Him, I needed to forgive others of their sins against me. I mean, the Lord’s Prayer, what we are taught is the “perfect prayer” says, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

If we forgive others, then God can forgive us and we can have a chance of an amazing future in Heaven.

What I was never taught, what I never learned growing up, was how to forgive myself, so while I was busy forgiving others, so that I could have a future chance in Heaven, I was living in a version of Hell on earth.

I wasn’t taught how to forgive myself for being “stupid” enough to trust my boyfriend to go with him to his friends house.

I didn’t learn how to forgive myself for being so “slutty” that I wore a knee-length denim skirt and a long sleeve button up shirt that day, that I had buttoned all the way up, but somehow, I must have been “asking for it.”

I never knew how to forgive myself for being so embarrassed about what “I” did that day, the day my boyfriend decided that I had been teasing him long enough, that he forced himself inside of me, without even taking my clothes off, that I didn’t tell anybody for months, and I “allowed” it to keep happening for another eight months.

I had forgiven him for what he did, so I could go to Heaven, but I had never forgiven myself. I get upset when people blame victims, but I had been doing that my whole life to myself.

Then a few months ago, my therapist asked me when I was going to forgive myself, as I was leaving. I was so angry with him, for the entire week between sessions. That question was all I could think about.

Forgiving myself? I struggled with it for almost two weeks. I cried, I screamed. I yelled at my therapist. I finally forgave myself.

I had to realize I was a fifteen year old child. I was not in control of that situation in any way. He drove me there, I knew something felt off, but I had no way of leaving and nobody to call, no way to call anyone since there were no cell phones back then. Once he started, he had me pinned down and was about 200 pounds to my 90 pounds, there was no way for me to sop him.

I didn’t have anyone to turn to when it was over. There were no safe adults in my life. The adults at school would have to call the police, my mom would think I was a slut and a sinner. If I told the adults at school my mom would eventually find out, which is exactly what happened months later. She ended up telling me that I had to marry him.

Since I forgave myself, I no longer feel like I’m living in my own personal version of Hell on earth. My thoughts have slowed down (most of the time) and I can sleep at night. I don’t constantly feel like I’m in fight or flight mode.

Forgiving others, is something I recommend if you need to in order to move on from them.

Forgiving yourself, I highly recommend, I don’t think you can live your life to it’s fullest potential if you don’t.

April Is Sexual Assault Awareness Month

I was sexually assaulted for the first time in Junior High when a boy touched my crotch as he walked past me getting off the bus. I was raped by by boyfriend a few years later when I was fifteen. I didn’t break up with him immediately because he threatened to tell people, especially my mom, that I’d had sex with him if I broke up with him.

In the ultra-conservative, Christian church I belonged to at the time, having sex before marriage was equivalent to murder; it was just about the ultimate sin. If my mom found out that I’d had sex, she’d call me slut, whore, easy, and I’d endure lecture upon lecture about how I was used goods, that no man would ever want me know, how I had given up that ONE GIFT that I had to offer my future husband. How do I know she’d do that? I’d heard her talk about other people plenty of times, she did not keep her judgement to herself.

Later, when I’d end up alone with that boyfriend, if he wanted to have sex and I didn’t, he’d remind me,

“We already did it, so what’s the big deal?”

Or, “If you really loved me you would.”

Or, “So, you don’t want to be with me anymore, fine. Leave me. See who’ll want used goods like you.”

Or, “If you don’t, I’ll go tell everybody you’re a slut and that we have sex all the time.”

Or, “I bought you dinner, you owe me this.”

When I was fifteen years old, I was just scared to tell him no. I didn’t want anyone to find out what he did to me. I felt dirty, used, embarrassed, worthless, and unlovable. When I finally did tell my mom what happened she told me I had to marry him because I had sex with him. I was shocked!

As an adult I know that is coercive rape, when I was a teenager, I just thought I was too weak to say no. When I finally reported to the police what happened a few months later, when I found the courage to break up with him, even the male police officer I reported to, told me nothing would happen because I kept having sex with him. I told him it was because I was scared to say no. I told him that he hit me. None of it mattered, because I stayed.

Coercive rape is rape. Period. End of story. It doesn’t matter why you stay. If coercive rape is happening to you, most likely the entire relationship is dangerous and you need an escape plan to get out safely. Do what it take to keep yourself safe, but plan an escape.

Here are some resources:

https://www.rainn.org/resources–National Sexual Assault Hotline information

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Healing and a Thought Spiral

This post is going to be a bit different than most. I usually write specifically for this blog and I have a personal journal. Sometimes what I write in my journal inspires what I what for this blog, but usually they are completely separate writings. Today, I am going to write here what I wrote in my personal journal yesterday after what was an extremely difficult night for me.

March 25, 2022

I’ve been avoiding sitting down and writing this for most of the morning. I woke up at 5 am and was able to go back to sleep until 7:30 ish. It’s now 9:37. I’ve been working so hard at avoiding this, that I actually did my physical therapy exercises for my hip, which I haven’t done in well over a year.

I’ve been having trouble falling asleep this week and last night was no different. I went to bed about 10, as usual, and was just laying there, wide awake, while my thoughts stampeded around in my mind. It was all random thoughts running through, like all the different animals from the stampede scene on Jumanji, a few related, but just passing by, keeping me awake none the less.

Suddenly, one of the thoughts separated from the test and attached itself to me. Before I realized what had happened, I was taken into a thought spiral and held there until my heart was racing, I couldn’t catch my breath, and tears were forming in my eyes. I wanted to leave, but I was frozen in place, I felt trapped.

That’s me at the bottom laying in my bed.

I was able to eventually calm myself down by taking deep breaths and repeating to myself, “I’m safe,” over and over, out loud with each breath I took.

When I finally fell asleep, I had weird dreams all night. Of course, I don’t remember them, but one of them woke me up and I had to remind myself that I wasn’t married anymore, well technically I am, but not really, we’re just waiting for the courts to catch up to us. When I woke up that time, I thought he was in bed with me. Needless to say, it tool me a little bit to fall back to sleep.

I don’t understand why I feel like I’ve made so much progress, then BAM, I get thrown backwards.

Learning From the Past

From mid-January to mid-March of 2015, I was on the jury of a sexual harassment civil lawsuit. Four women were suing their former boss for sexually harassing them in the workplace and making a hostile work environment because of their gender.

It was two grueling months of testimony that brought up a lot for me. As I sat silently in the jury box, listening to the women tell their stories from the witness stand, listened to what they endured and how they felt, brought up emotions that I thought I had dealt with long before. Then deliberations were intense, we deliberated so long, that another jury was chosen, the trial completed and the verdict read, before we were done.

In the end two of the plaintiffs we ruled he was not guilty of, one we ruled he was guilty of, and one we couldn’t reach a decision.

During the trial, I couldn’t talk about anything I was going through. I know everyone gets that instruction and I’m sure that most people go home and talk to their spouses or friends about the trial, at least a little bit to ease what they’re going through, but I literally couldn’t because our friends knew the defendant. They would hang out with us and talk about their friend’s court case, I’d have to go to the bathroom, then come back and change the subject.

Once the trial was over, I went to dinner with someone I thought I could talk to about how the case made me feel. I had been talking for about twenty minutes, when they looked at me and asked, “Are you ever going to stop talking about this?” I immediately stopped, but it sent me into a spiral into depression and anxiety that I hadn’t experienced since about 1999.

By the fall of 2015, I wanted out of my life. I felt like I just made every one’s life worse by being in it, that I was a burden to every one, especially my family. I went to counseling, that helped, slowly, but it did. By the winter of 2016, I wanted to be here again. In all of it, I never made any attempts, just a lot of fantasizing about how much better every one else’s life would be if I was gone.

In March of 2016 I started a Facebook miniseries that I called “You Might be in an Abusive or Controlling Relationship if…”, a memory of it popped up this past week. On March 9, 2016 I wrote “If  your significant other in any way belittles you, demeans you or makes you feel like you don’t deserve better, you are in an abusive relationship.”

There were eleven posts in total, all of them things that I have had people do to me in my life. When I wrote the first one, I was scared. I had told people about my past experience in abusive and controlling relationships, but I had never put it out there for the world to see. I am so glad I did.

I wrote that miniseries for a very specific reason, to help a friend who I couldn’t talk to, but knew she’d see that on Facebook, but it ended up helping me too. It helped me heal. It led me to write my book, it led me to more healing from past trauma and learning to be my authentic self, instead of always being who people want me to be. (This is still a work in progress.)

We all have things in our lives that we can learn from. If we don’t learn from the things we’ve been through, we’re doomed to repeat them, I’m a prime example of that. I did NOT learn from my high school relationship, or my parents. I’ve been having to learn the lessons from those relationships for a long time.

Take time to see the patterns of hurt and pain in your life, even if its not abusive, and learn from them. Learn what you really want and go for it, ask for it, be your true self.