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When our children are anxious, hurt or upset, it pierces our soul. Our love for them is so great, we are effected even more than if it was happening to us.
So that leaves us to wonder how we can best respond to lessen their pain and decrease their fear.
Depression Won’t Define Me
Back some thirty-five years ago when I was a child, the word depression wasn’t readily used as a diagnosis, rather, it was used to describe a point-in-time state of being. "I’m depressed because I have no friends." While this use of the word is obviously still valid, depression, in all its varied forms, has come to mean so much more. Back in those days, we’d call it a bout-of-the-blues or feeling down-and-out to which our mothers would emphatically state, "snap out of it… stop feeling sorry for yourself!" My Mom didn’t realize (though, who could blame her) that this prolonged, repetitive, inescapable, inexplicable "mood" that plagued me was actually an illness.
You decide you want to heal from PTSD. You've had enough of living with high anxiety, nightmares, depression, emotional mood swings, the feeling that just stepping out of your house brings on an avalanche of overstimulation. So you pull up your bootstraps, tighten your belt, strap yourself in and take the plunge: You reach out for help, receive your diagnosis, educate yourself about treatment options, choose one, find the right practitioner, start your sessions and..... find yourself full of all kinds of contradictory feelings.
Parenting a child with mental illness brings along many challenges. In my work, I've found parents who have a difficult time with children who just WON'T listen. You talk to them until your voice is hoarse and your kids continue to not do what you want them to do.
Homework is difficult for most children and it's even harder for children with ADHD. But there are ways to handle homework problems and keep the frustrations and hassles to a minimum. It's all about planning ahead and being organized. If you start out early and set the ground rules, your child doesn't need to endure the usual homework frustrations and problems.
A chance meeting with the pastors of an Internet church resulted in me being given a book called "The Hallelujah Life" by Richard Propes, an Indianapolis-based children's advocate who has paraplegia and spinal bifida. While there is some triggering material in this book due to descriptions of the sexual abuse he survived and his suicidal episodes, this is a book I can not recommend strongly enough for people with borderline personality disorder (BPD). I learned much from this 117-page book of poetry and short stories, but perhaps the most important lesson was that abuse is confusing.
"I feel like I have AIDS man! Everybody's scared of me!"
I recently heard these powerful words from a client who struggles with adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
I’ve been using my experience as an eating disorder survivor as a springboard to have a larger discussion about mental health. Looking back, I can trace the beginning of bulimia to a specific set of events and triggers. Years before, there was already a problem with food anxiety, striving for perfection and body image issues. I didn’t know what bulimia was at the time but I certainly understood hunger, binging, purging and over-exercising. I also didn’t know my mind was slowly developing an eating disorder. The condition, however, was becoming very real.
When I speak to kids about my experience with bipolar disorder, really, I have a series of failures to explain. I tell them how treatment after treatment failed. I talk about drug failures, the failure of the vagus nerve stimulator and the failure of electroconvulsive therapy. I lot of my sentences have the word, “unfortunately,” in them.
And after one of my presentations last week, one person asked what I would say to someone who was going through a similar experience. I thought that was a very important question.
So here’s what I would say to someone who’s experiencing treatment failure.
When first diagnosed with a mental illness our lives--and the lives of those closest to us--change drastically. For lack of a better cliche: like night and day; black and white. We know, instinctively, that our lives will never be the same. Sometimes, we fear they will become more difficult, or we will forget who we were prior to diagnosis. It often feels as if we are losing a part of ourselves--our "self." And that's scary. Let's explore why we may feel this way.
My point being, I'm right there with you. I hate the rollercoaster. I just want to live life without being in a state of constant fight or flight mode, only for his character to change and de-escalate and I fall for the person I fell for all over again.
Exhausting is a horrible word. The understatement of all understatements, if you will.
I wish there were better support groups for this kind of mental health condition.