Unconscious thought, Freud and me

I have been reading about unconscious bias recently, and the way it reinforces what we already believe in. Unconscious bias makes us tend to like people who think the same way we do, who have similar backgrounds and upbringings, and even look the way we do. This has a number of effects on how we view the world.

Bias shapes our world view because it provides a shortcut for our brains when receiving and reviewing new information. If we immediately disregard anything that doesn’t fit with what we already know or what feels familiar to us, then over time we develop a narrower world view. We will get less exposure to ideas, to different ways of life, to different situations. Our ability to have empathy for people diminishes if we can’t imagine ourselves in the situations they find themselves in.

I became interested in what my own unconscious biases were when I realised after reading information about the subject, that just declaring you were open and tolerant of others wasn’t enough to actually override the effect of bias on your thinking. I could tell myself all I liked that I didn’t discriminate against certain groups but that didn’t make it true. And in fact, all the reading I was doing was really reinforcing my unconscious bias as I was subconsciously filtering what I chose to read, and the information I was retaining.

Then I asked myself why I really cared about it at all. Why did I need to think about how I was thinking? I got stuck on this concept for a number of days, wondering why I cared about what my unconscious beliefs were. Sometimes when I have an idea that fascinates me I get obsessed with it, research it to death and read everything I can about it. But this one felt just out of my reach, like I couldn’t quite grasp something really important about it. I couldn’t even begin to narrow down a definition of what was in my head so I could type something in a search engine.

I put it down for a bit, got side tracked in other things as I tend to do. I happened across a blog post about transference which is where “we unconsciously transfer feelings and attitudes from a person of situation in the past on to a person or situation in the present”. Basically, when a person or situation reminds you of something else you transfer some of the feelings you have about the original person or situation on to the new one. I was fascinated by this, in part because of the link between these unconscious thoughts and the unconscious bias idea I had been trying to get my head around. In both of these phenomena the mind is taking what we have learnt in the past and applying it to the present, effectively creating a shortcut for thinking. This sets up a situation where we learn something and then potentially perpetually recreate and reinforce it.

I started to get really excited by the idea that all these things could be impacting on the way I see and react with the world and I am not even aware of any of it. I looked up Sigmund Freud who is the founding father of psychoanalysis – a type of therapy in which transference plays an important role in making the unconscious conscious.

One of the first things that came up a picture of Freud’s unconscious mind model, in which he used an iceberg to describe the three levels of mind. The tip of the iceberg is shown as the conscious mind, which is all the thoughts and mental processes we are aware of. The pre-conscious is the “working memory” type area of the brain, and then the unconscious mind, the bit of the ice berg well under water, is everything that we are not conscious of that influences thoughts, attitudes, processes, feelings and behaviour. Freud believed that our feelings, motives and decisions are influenced by past experiences and this is stored in the unconscious. While I don’t agree with all of Freud’s work, I do believe, as he did, that more of behaviour is governed by the unconscious mind that we realise.

And by putting all this together I had my answer. I cared about unconscious bias, and about situations of transference, and my core beliefs, because I am trying to change my pattern of behaviour. BPD is marked by (among other things) patterns of instability in mood, behaviour, self image and functioning. I need to be aware of the unconscious thoughts and beliefs my brain is holding in order to disrupt the pattern and then change it.

Therapy has allowed me to look at this by working backwards – from the action such as impulsive or suicidal behaviour, back to the thought patterns and then back further to the trigger for those thoughts. But by also trying to uncover the unconscious core thoughts and beliefs held by my brain I should be able to work on changing them before I am triggered.

So I have decided to see if I can discover what my unconscious thoughts and biases are. Hopefully this will help me discover more about my patterns and how I can change them to bring more stability to my life.

Ka Kite Ano

Depression

This is the not the post I expected or even wanted to be writing tonight. In fact, I am halfway through writing on a completely different topic, which I had intentions of finishing tonight.

But here I am. And that’s because I’m struggling with my depression again. I knew it was coming. I could feel it in me waters (as Kath from ‘Kath and Kim’ used to say). It has a pattern which I can recognise now. Not necessarily do anything about, but recognise.

Over the last few weeks my anxiety has built up. Every time I feel my anxiety getting worse I wonder what brings it on and this time has been no exception. There are always events in my personal life, little and bigger things which seem to have a larger impact on me than they would on other people. That’s part of my BPD – limited ability to deal with the stressors of everyday life. I feel everything at 1000% so something that’s small to someone else is magnified for me. And those events buffet me back and forth like the strong wind toying with a small sailboat.

This time, as with all the other times, I started trying to shore myself up. Increasing the exercise, making sure I had books to read and an art project or two to keep myself occupied. I joined the gym because one of my theories was that high intensity exercise would help manage my need for endorphins, which is what was driving my cutting behaviour.

My stress at work increased and my insomnia returned. I know what’s coming, I can feel it, I can almost see the black cloud about to engulf me. I can’t shake off the overwhelming, crushing, defeated feeling I have when I am not making head way with my work. I have so much on that I can’t prioritise effectively, and I know I’m not spending my energy in the right places. I should be able to handle things, I know what needs to be done and I’ve no urgent deadlines so no need to stress. But my anxiety is making me feel sick every time I think about meeting a client or picking up a file. I want to double check myself every time I make a decision but I am aware of time pressure – the more time something takes the more cost on the client’s bill. So I force myself to go with my instincts. I force myself to walk into each meeting with a smile on my face and pretend the confidence I wish I had.

Things get worse though. I know how important sleep is to my wellness. My basic wellness plan for when things are starting to get bad is eat good food, drink water, get exercise and get enough sleep. When these things start to fall that’s when I know the darkness is creeping over my last line of defence.

I go to bed on time. I cook nutritious dinners (though I do eat chocolate afterwards…). I make it to the gym four times a week. I am completely exhausted. But when I go to bed at night I lie there wide awake. Not thinking anything in particular, but not sleeping either. When I do fall asleep I roll around restlessly all night long, unable to get into a deep sleep.

The less sleep I get the more cranky and depressive I am. Everything makes me want to yell and hit and stomp around, or put the covers back over my head. Sometimes both.
Slow driver? Cue road rage from me. Child not picking anything up or putting it away? Cue yelling from me about irresponsibility and how I should throw it all away. Someone makes a mistake? More rage from me about imbeciles who can’t engage their brains. I park too close to one side of the garage or the other? I’m an idiot who can’t get anything right.

I went to the gym after work yesterday hoping the endorphins would kick in and I would feel slightly better, or at least tired enough for a deep sleep. All that happened was that I was too tired to go and get milk and bread, so we had nothing for breakfast this morning.

The cupboards are bare because I haven’t done any grocery shopping. My child is a chronic bed wetter and there are piles of washed laundry on the floor in the lounge as they have fallen from the chair they were on. There is washing hanging on a clothes airer in the lounge and washing on another line in the garage. There’s more washing to be washed in a pile by the washing machine, and in a pile in the corner of the bedroom (just to be clear – everything with pee on it is washed every day – it’s the other stuff that piles up around it). My kitchen bench is full of dishes, the bin is full, the bathroom needs cleaning, the vacuuming needs doing and paperwork for the last two months is spilling out of the mail rack.

I am hiding from everyone and everything and all I wanted to do this morning was put the covers over my head and close my eyes. I have no desire to do anything. TV doesn’t interest me. I can’t be bothered reading or drawing. I don’t want to go to the gym or talk to anyone. Every day I get up and pretend to be a person. I slap on the face I show to the world which says “I’m doing ok” and I go to work.

Then at night, when I am tired and my defences are down, thoughts like why bother and I’m no use to anyone creep in. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suicidal. The depression is just asking me what the point in trying is. When I’m like this and life seems so endless and grey and hopeless, I can’t remember the feeling of happiness. Intellectually I know that I was, and it was only a few short weeks ago. But the memory of what that feels like is gone.

So one of the ways I try and remind myself is singing. When I am feeling happier I sing along to my favourite songs. I know it sounds odd, corny even. But my most reliable measure of depression is whether I am singing in the car. If my favourite songs come on and I don’t hum along or sing then I know I’m in deep. But I can remind myself what being happy is like by remembering when I have sung. Turning up the music and connecting to it by singing releases something in me.

This is another thing I have stumbled on to by accident but it is apparently used with dementia patients as our brains are hard wired to connect music with long term memory and deep emotional recall. You can read more about this here.

So, I wanted to share this with you all so you can get a sense of what depression can look like. And for those of you with depression, who are also struggling, you are not alone.

The good thing about knowing this was coming was knowing that it will end. After the stress and the anxiety comes the depression, and then it will pass. That doesn’t make it any easier, or suck any less, but it will pass. Hold on till it does.

Kia Kaha

Self harm and me

Trigger alert – today’s post talks about self harm and it’s causes. If self harm is a problem for you please get help from a professional. This post describes my experiences and is in no way designed to encourage anyone else to self harm.

Just as an added note, I wrote the following post last weekend. I debated all week about whether to post it because the issue of self harm carries a huge amount of stigma. Many people know I have this problem because the scars are hard to hide, but no one (with the exception of my family and one other person) has ever raised the subject with me.

The shame and stigma attached to self harm are overwhelming at times and it is perhaps one of the hardest aspects of mental illness to discuss. Many people can not understand why you would want to harm yourself, particularly using the method I do which is cutting. The following post describes what leads to this behaviour and the biological reasons why.

(Sunday)

Today….today was unfortunately one of those days that is so common for me as a person with BPD. A day where my moods changed with speed of the wind outside, sweeping away all traces of what I felt previously and hammering me again and again with intense emotion.

This morning I woke feeling motivated. Little G went off to her father’s early, and then I got on with the washing and ate breakfast. I had decided to spend another hour or so in bed as it had been a long week and I was trying to take things easy so as not to get sick.

All morning my brain fought me. It was sunny outside and there was a war raging inside my head. One side telling me how lazy I was, and that I was wasting sunshine and time laying in bed reading. And the other side telling me I needed the rest, to give my body a chance to recharge and get ready for the next week. I recently found an article about boring self care and her drawings were the main reason I managed to stick to my guns this morning and try not to berate myself too much for resting and reading. She does cute little cartoons about the little things we can do to take care of ourselves, and today I knew that rest was what I needed. Didn’t stop my brain from trying to take over with my normal pattern of non stop activity to fill a long day by myself though.

After lunch I stopped feeling like I should do something, and started feeling like I didn’t want to do anything. This was particularly bad timing as this is when I’d actually planned to get moving and do chores and buy groceries. It took me several hours to force myself to have a shower and get lunch, put on shoes and go outside for a walk. My brain kept distracting me and I was having trouble focusing on what I should be doing. I wasn’t actually doing anything during this time except wandering around pausing and looking at all the stuff I should have been doing. The thoughts in my head about me being useless and lazy were pretty loud, and were drowning out anything much else at that point.

I finally got outside and did about half an hour’s walk. This week’s goal is to be consistent with my exercise, and try and do 20-30 minutes on 5 or more days. I walked yesterday and today so was reasonably pleased by the time I got home. Off to the supermarket and for some inexplicable reason, the person in front of me drove at 35 km/h the whole way (speed limit is 50 km/h, I normally do more like 60!). The frustration and anger that overtook me was incredible, I was imagining setting up a punching bag and slamming my fists in to it over and over. After 5 minutes I was in full blown rage mode, though my rational/logical mind kept trying to tell me I wasn’t in any hurry and that I should calm down.

Pull in to the supermarket car park and park the car in the far corner away from anyone else so I can have some deep breaths and calm down. Then on into the supermarket. After only a few minutes inside I start feeling really upset, then a sad song comes and I have tears in my eyes while I am picking out apples. After telling myself that I’m being ridiculous and have no reason for crying, I manage to pull myself together enough to continue with the shopping.

In the supermarket environment I’m overwhelmed by the number of people, the bright lights, tiredness and the music. My physical senses are often in overload in settings like that due to my autism.

My emotions have run the gauntlet from motivated to hyped up, to depressed, then to confused and distracted, happy after my walk, then tired, angry, full of rage, then to sad (complete with tears). I feel so overwhelmed by the large swings in my mood that my brain keeps trying to default to its standard method of taking the emotional pain away.

All I can think about is drinking alcohol and cutting myself. I’m severely triggered walking past the wine and beer aisles. The craving for a drink is so strong that I can’t stop myself from choosing a bottle of wine to take home, all the while knowing it is the first step on a disastrous path that only has one end.

I’m well aware of how destructive the drinking is, and how once I start drinking then what little control I have over my self harm urges subsides. This usually leaves me sitting in a pool of blood with a razor blade in my hand at some point.

I have to walk past the utility knives, don’t need those as my house is littered with them, and anyway they don’t provide the deep cuts that give me the relief. They have long since been replaced with razor blades.

I’m not buying blades today. My hands are shaking on the trolley as I walk past but I try and tell myself that if I don’t buy them then all I’ll do is drink. Unfortunately, this has not proved true in the past. I know full well how to take a razor apart when I’m drunk and in the grip of my compulsion.

In situations like this in the past I’ve gone straight home after the supermarket, opened the bottle, sat down and cried about what I’m about to do. I’m normally a spirits girl and a shot is all it takes to release the flood gates. That is when the blades come out and I promise myself it will just be one or two cuts. That I’ll see the blood and feel a bit better and then I’ll stop. However, it usually takes 8 – 10 shots with small chasers of coke before I’ve cut myself enough to be able to control it enough to stop.

It’s hard to describe the relief the cutting provides, and it can be different depending on the circumstances at the time I have the urge to self harm. For me, self harm is a compulsion. I’ve used it so many times in the past that my brain is wired up to want to complete acts of self harm to relieve my emotional pain.

Part of the reason for this is because at some stage I accidentally tapped into the brain’s ability to use it’s natural painkiller, endorphins, to relieve my emotional pain. Our human brains are wired up to sense both physical and emotional pain using the same two areas: the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex. When you get hurt physically, your brain registers the pain in these two areas and prompts the production of endorphins, which is the brain’s own natural morphine. Wikipedia says “The principal function of endorphins is to inhibit the transmission of pain signals; they may also produce a feeling of euphoria very similar to that produced by other opioids.^[3]

Basically this means that if you cause yourself physical pain, the body produces endorphins which then act on your emotional pain as well. In terms of self harm, this is why it can be so addictive – create enough physical pain and your emotional pain will be relieved with endorphins your body has produced to get rid of physical pain. Unfortunately there is no way to stimulate an endorphin response to emotional pain without causing yourself physical pain. And it seems (though more research is being done on this) that you can not relieve emotional pain with painkillers made for physical pain.

The upshot of all this is that every time I create physical pain in response to my emotional pain, I force my body to produce endorphins which relieves both types of pain. This creates a feedback loop – emotional pain leads to physical pain which causes endorphins which relieves the pain. And every single time I use that response to my emotions, the feedback loop is reinforced, making that connection stronger and stronger. This makes the urge to harm myself become a compulsion when faced with situations that trigger overwhelming emotions.

This is not the only reason people self harm. Sometimes for me it is about punishing myself, causing myself pain because I believe I deserve it. Sometimes it is more about the scars and pain on the outside matching the black deadness you have on the inside. Often it is a combination of things – a triggering event may cause the compulsion but may also cause me shame because I’m not living up to my own expectations. I can spiral down as thoughts about what a terrible person and waste of space I am go around and around in my head.

The therapy I’m doing, which is a combination of acceptance and commitment therapy and dialectical behavioural therapy with a few other things thrown in, is teaching me to recognise my triggers, to try and prevent them, and what to do when I am in this situation. In order to remove my self harm behaviour I have to have something to replace it with. Not only do I need to recognise when I’m having thoughts that lead to overwhelm, I have to self care skills, triggers, be able to tune in to myself and my surroundings (mindfulness), and a range of coping skills to suit all sorts of situations.

So, last Sunday, despite the fact that I brought the wine, I came home and I did not drink it. I put it away at the back of the cupboard, then I ate dinner. I had forgotten to eat much during the day and it wasn’t until I did some mindfulness on the way home from the supermarket I realised I was hungry. I switched on Netflix and watched a funny movie, with my soft sensory blanket on my knee and the cat on my lap. Then I got on here and wrote about my day. I did some other writing which was a bit of homework for my therapist and finally sat down to read. Crisis averted, till next time.

You might think, reading what I did to cope with that overwhelming urge to self harm, that the things I did were nothing special so how could they possibly have helped if I was really that bad. The answer to that is two fold. One, the whole time I did the things I outlined above my body was craving endorphins. The thoughts don’t leave my mind, I just try and distract myself from acting on them. Two, it’s taken a lot (a lot a lot) of hard work over the last two years to get this far. I have crisis strategies like holding cubes of ice (either in my hands or against my arms), submerging my face in cold water, intense exercise (like short sprints), and paced breathing. But first I try distraction and soothing my senses with things I know work for me (a really good link explaining this is here.

Things are slowly getting better but sometimes I fail, and sometimes I fall. I am always going to have to be mindful not to fall back in to old patterns. At times the amount of work I need to do to get and remain mentally healthy looks like an enormous burden. But I have learnt that there is a time to look at the big picture and a time to look only a little way in front of you. Sometimes it’s best to try and deal with today and plan just for tomorrow rather than get too tangled up in what the future might hold.

Ka kite ano

Little G and my mental health

Thank you to all those people who commented on facebook and here about my previous post. It was amazing to get that much positive feedback as I was really apprehensive about putting that sort of information out there about myself. It’s a very humbling experience to find so many people appreciate my honesty. I had to think long and hard about whether putting my experiences online was the right thing to do, because I do have a professional job and the stigma is very real. Not from my co-workers (love you guys!) but because I work so hard to present a calm, capable front to my clients and I didn’t want to do anything that might cause any of them to doubt my abilities (if they ever find this).

I also have to be cautious on Little G’s behalf for several reasons. I am open with her about my mental health as much as I feel is age appropriate. I have to try and make sure she doesn’t feel any obligation to try and make me better, or feel happy, or to take care of me. I repeatedly explain to her that I am her Mum and I do my very best to be as stable as possible for her. It is my job to take care of her and provide for her, not the other way around. She loves to do things for me like make me breakfast and she is very aware of when I am not well. She can read the expressions on my face when I’ve had a bad day better than anyone else I know. My top priority is to make sure she feels safe and loved, every single day.

When I was in hospital in March it affected her considerably more than I expected it to. She was told that I was in hospital, and she stayed with her grandparents and auntie. I didn’t want her to come and see me, partly because I was very unwell and I thought that might scare her, and partly because I was worried about exposing her to some of the strange behaviour of the other unwell people on the ward. I had about four days in there, then I was out for a few days at my parent’s place, then I got worse and had to go back for another four or five days. She was very worried about me, and she was noticeably sad at school. Her teacher was concerned enough to mention it to me the following week, and several mums also told me she had said various things to their kids about how upset she was that I was in hospital.

It’s very awkward to explain why you are in hospital to people when your child has said ‘Mummy has something wrong with her brain’ and everyone’s minds jump to cancer or brain tumour!! I try as much as possible to be honest, especially in situations like that, because I don’t want people thinking I have cancer and I don’t want to be embarrassed because my brain was unwell instead of say my heart or my kidneys. But telling another parent or your child’s teacher you were on a psychiatric ward is not exactly my idea of fun, and it sure isn’t for them either! There’s always awkward silence while you can almost see the wheels in their brains turning, trying to work out what to say. My embarrassment is less about what they might think of me, and more about having put them in a position where they don’t know how to respond.

Then there is the inevitable variation on the theme ‘hope you are feeling better now’ and it’s difficult to know what to say to that. It’s mental illness and you don’t just recover or feel better in a few days or even weeks. I always appreciate the sentiment but if I do my default and say ‘yes, much better thanks’ it’s basically a lie, but the truth is socially inappropriate. This is where my Aspie brain gets a little tangled up in whether honesty and truth should win out over social convention…..

Little G’s support worker also reminded both of us a couple of weeks back that kids can be very cruel. She said that it is good to be open talking about mental health, but that Little G needs to respect my privacy and not tell everyone her Mummy has a mental illness. Partly because it’s my choice whether to share that, and whom to share that with, and partly because kids can and often do tease children whose parents have mental health issues, saying their parent is ‘mental’ or worse. Those are two things I hadn’t really thought about and I appreciate her reminding us of those issues.

Over the holidays Little G got to attend the holiday program put on by Family Link where she met other kids whose parents have mental illness and/or addictions. They did some fun activities and learnt about the brain and how it works. I think the best bit for her was learning that there are other kids out there living in the same situation as her. Their parent is struggling with similar issues to those I have and they are going through the same things.

She’s still working one on one with her support worker too. At each session she learns about various mental illnesses, the symptoms of my particular one, about feelings, what makes her happy, and what to do when I am unwell. We’ve put a support plan in place so she knows what will happen if I go to hospital again, and it’s been reinforced to her that my mental health is not her responsibility. She seems much more settled and less anxious now so it seems to have paid off.

I seem completely unable to write a succinct blog post to I’ll sign off here.

Ka kite ano

Chris Cornell, suicide and major depression

The death of Chris Cornell by suicide, and the subsequent discussion of his death in various forms of media, has had me thinking about my own major episodes of depression.

When I heard about Chris Cornell I was so incredibly sad. The man was a genius, and the Temple of the Dog song Hunger Strike (sung in duet with Eddie Vetter of Pearl Jam) is my favourite song of all time. Oddly enough, though I love most of Soundgarden and Audioslave’s music, it’s this song I most identify with. It’s all about staying true to yourself and what you are doing, regardless of sucess or money. And that there is really no way of having more than you need without taking from someone else that can’t really afford to give it to you. Interestingly, Temple of the Dog was a collaboration between artists who would go on to be in Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, and was a tribute to their friend Andrew Wood who died of a heroin overdose in 1990.

The lyrics of ‘Hunger Strike’ have been running through my head all day while I’ve been thinking about Chris and what frame of mind he must have been in. I know only too well what that pain is like, having suffered so terribly with suicidal depression myself. But I also feel so devastated for his wife, kids, family and friends, because I’ve been on that end of suicide as well. I know a number of men who have taken their lives, and I’ve witnessed what that does to people. You analyse every thought, every moment, every word spoken, to see if you can find the reason. You relentlessly ask yourself if you should have seen it, if you could have done more. Whether you would have been able to stop it.

The radio conversation I listened to this afternoon talked about how selfish Chris was to take his own life. Neither of the djs had experienced depression and had no idea how someone could feel that way and not be able to think of what it might do to the people around them. One of the djs made the comment that Chris had everything, money, talent, sucess, a family etc and how could he still be unhappy with all that going for him. That he should have used his kids as an anchor and remembered what it would do to them if he was to die that way.

Now, I know that not all people who die by suicide have depression. And maybe Chris wasn’t depressed, sometimes overdoses and accidents happen. But he has said enough in the past about the struggles of depression to imagine that it could have been that, and even if someone doesn’t look like they are struggling from the outside it doesn’t mean that they aren’t.

I have suffered from depression since the age of 10 or 11. I have had a number of major episodes, but the worst one by far started in 2013 and almost destroyed my life. By November of 2013 I was in such a mess that I couldn’t follow a TV program or read a book, I certainly couldn’t work. I sat and stared at the wall and wished I was dead. It was the most pain I’ve ever been in and I couldn’t get away from it. It was inside my head and all I could picture was that permanent solution to it, death.

The first time I remember wishing I could die I was 11. I’d been bullied on and off for several years, and something expensive of mine got broken and needed replacing. I felt ashamed and guilty and like I was a waste of space on earth who just caused hassle and cost money. I wanted to die to escape from those feelings. On and off all through my teens I had dark periods, but as I got older they got longer in length and I fell that much further.

This is one of the poems I wrote in 2000, when I was about 17:

Darkness decends

And I am sitting alone

Outside

In the cold, crisp air

The rain stings

My sodden skin

As I watch the brightly lit house

Secure people bustling

Like ants in it’s inards.

Warmth emits from it

But does not seem to

Penetrate its walls.

It stands solid, fortress like

And unreachable.

I can see in

But they do not see out.

I shout until I am hoarse

My throat raw and bleeding

And still no one throws a glance

My way.

Then there is this one from 2001:

Can’t stop the voices in my head

The demons rising up

From the firy hell in the

Dark depths of my mind,

And trying to pull me down.

I kick them off and

Avert my thoughts from the

Sweet killing pain of the knife.

Surely I can find something worth

Living for

Something the shadows can’t touch

Which gives me some purpose.

The demons claw at my legs

Whisper thoughts of pain in my ears

And promise to free me from the

Burdens of living life.

I can’t make them stop.

Don’t even know if I want to.

Maybe I should just give up

And refuse to live.

I don’t think anyone would even notice.

And that’s the thing about depression. It makes you feel like you are in this black cloud. You can’t see anything but the bleakness. Life feels pointless and futile and I find myself questioning why humans crawled out of the sea and evolved from chimps and what we were we supposed to gain from that? And why I am I here, in this house, marking time?

I try so hard to think positively and be kind to myself but sometimes depression is not something you can tackle just by doing those things or getting more sleep/exercise/eating better etc. I am on meds and have been since my breakdown in 2013. I resisted them for so long, feeling like if I took them it would be like I’d failed or I was admitting I needed help. But they do help, even if sometimes all that means is that the edge is taken off things a bit so I can ask for help.

Asking for help can seem like scaling a very high mountain. You know you need to climb it to be able to move forward. But saying the words “I’m scared and I need you” can be incredibly difficult. How do you tell someone you care about that you are thinking of taking your own life? It’s like saying them and their feelings don’t matter to you – that you are prepared to hurt them in the most final way possible to end your own pain. But I’ve also been in the position where I’ve told a professional and been lectured about “how can you even consider doing that?”, and “think of your child and your family”. It took several years not to feel violently ill every time I thought of that conversation. When I opened up to someone and was honest about how dark my thoughts were they were more freaked out by them than I was. Once that’s happened once or twice you learn not to be totally honest about what’s in your head for fear of upsetting them or causing them to reject you completely.

There’s been a number of times the pain in my head has been overwhelming and I’ve wanted to end my life. Sometimes I don’t sleep properly for weeks, I can’t go to sleep or I wake in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. Or I have terrible nightmares which make me fear closing my eyes at night. I’ve had hallucinations where I’ve been out walking and seen bodies hanging from the branches of trees. Some days everything looks grey and all the colour and happiness and goodness has been sucked out of life. I can go for weeks being tormented by thoughts of being a terrible person, a bad parent, a fat lazy ugly bitch, remembering everthing people have said to me about looking or acting strange and the times in my life when I’ve been bullied. Sometimes the demands of working and the house and being a parent get on top of me and the smallest thing can send me spiralling into despair. At times like these the thoughts can be so loud in my brain that I can’t follow the plot of a TV program or movie, or read anything, because I can’t concentrate. Occasionally the only thing that’s stopped me from taking a handful of pills is imagining the horror of Little G finding me. I couldn’t do that to her. Not that I didn’t want to, but that I couldn’t ruin her life like that.

Its really hard to explain what goes through my head in that position – its kind of like ‘whats the point. I don’t want to live my life but I can’t leave, I can’t do that to my girl and to my family. I really don’t want to be here. All I can see is the struggle – the depression in my past and the struggle to dig myself out of the current episode. My life is never going to change, no body will ever love me. Can I face being alone forever. What the hell am I doing with my life’. And on and on and on it goes.

You can see how I got to the point of self harming. When you mix underdeveloped coping skills with significant emotional disturbance like this, self harm by cutting relieved my pain without the final ‘solution’ of death that I craved. I was less conflicted by it. It released endorphins which helped ease emotional pain, allowing me to keep living. Not a healthy coping strategy at all but one which becomes slightly more understandable when you have some idea of the pain which causes the action.

And I guess this is the same type of behaviour that causes some people to drink and do drugs and engage in all sorts of other self harming behaviours. The trouble is that the more you use these ‘strategies’ to cope, the more you become addicted to them, and the stronger those pathways become in your brain.

Whatever killed Chris, whether it was depression or drugs or something else, the world is a slightly darker place without his musical genius in it. RIP Chris. May you find your peace.

Just as an added note, if you are in crisis please please please tell someone

Lifeline – 0800 543 354

Suicide Crisis Helpline – 0508 828 865

Healthline – 0800 611 116

Samaritans – 0800 726 666

Go here and read it right to the end.

Emotional dysregulation in action

So far it looks like no one is reading this so I guess this is more of an online journal than anything else. Slightly disappointing but I guess it does relieve one of my fears, which was about putting my self and my experiences out there and having people troll me about it.

Anyway, its been a rough couple of days. I’ve been severely emotionally dysregulated, as my psychologist would say. Not only are my emotions all over the place but my brain is spinning, my thoughts are racing, I’ve been talking faster and a whole lot more than normal, and I flipped into bouts of hysterical laughing yesterday. I’m not getting a lot of sleep and that is making things all the more difficult to deal with, and my feet/ankles/legs and the rest of me is swelling with edema.

Yesterday I had my weekly psychologist appointment and something triggered and I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I wasn’t talking about anything funny, I was discussing how I had cried when I was trying to comfort a crying colleague at work. My laughing went on and on and I just couldn’t stop. This is the strangest feeling and I guess it must have been very odd for my therapist too. He pointed out how my laughing didn’t match the emotion of the situation, which I knew and of course is a classic BPD symptom. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it – uncontrollable, hyterical laughter just kept bubbling up in me and bursting out. Then I would gain a little bit of control back and either start crying or laugh again. That went on for a good half an hour.

I’ve got multiple symptoms at the moment, the ones I mentioned above is just the physical side of things. I am obsessing over buying a doll for my daughter – she’s been wanting a doll like her favourite book character Fancy Nancy has, which I guess the equivalent is either like a porcelain doll or an American Girl type doll. Both of which are out of my price range. So I’ve been obsessively researching other options. Not sure why – it’s not her birthday or Christmas, and she has plenty of toys to play with. She doesn’t need another doll and it’s likely to be only a passing whim anyway. But the idea has taken hold in my head and won’t let go. I have trouble managing my money for this reason. Because I get obssessed with whatever my latest idea is and despite my wise mind knowing better, I either buy a whole lot of it (art supplies) or very expensive things that I feel terrible guilt over because we didn’t really need them.

My compulsive buying also happens if I go shopping in this kind of a mood. At the time I tell myself I deserve a treat or my daughter needs it/wants it, or I have this really good idea that I just need supplies for. But the guilt often kicks in as soon as I walked out of the shop. I’m also a frustrated minimalist at heart so it annoys me that I’ve brought more things to put in my house that I will have to deal with. Then I feel ashamed that I can’t control my spending.

I’ve also been annoyed this afternoon as my case manager (part of my psychiatric outpatient team) moved my appointment from 10.30am to 10am on Monday. Part of the annoyance is that she is always moving my appointments around, this happens regularly, and I feel like some sort of second class citizen she can just shove aside when it suits. Then she also made a comment about having someone else coming in at 11am and I could keep my original appointment of 10.30am if I felt I would be ‘done and dusted’ by 11. I am not sure why this comment filled me with rage but it did. And all day I have felt like ringing and saying “stuff ya bloody appointment then, I don’t want it anyway”, and cancelling. I have not been able to let this go and yet I know I am being irrational.

I had a big argument with Little G’s dad last night when he came to drop her off. It started with a minor issue over payment of swimming fees, and quickly escalated from there. I am annoyed about him taking her to church as I am not religious at all and he didn’t ask me before he did it. This has been going on for weeks but my family said to leave it, that it wasnt worth fighting over and that there were worse places he could be taking her. So I’ve been biting my tounge but when the swimming fees thing came out I brought it up. Big mistake. The minor issue decended into a big argument over custody and my mental health and whether I was fit and well enough to look after our daughter.

He threatened to take me to Court and take Little G from me. Currently we have a court order in place (he went for full custody when we split when she was a baby) saying I have day to day care and specifying which days he has access. But he threatened to go to Court and get that overturned because of my mental illness. Unfortunately I know the Family Court don’t look kindly on mothers who have been on the psychiatric ward, no matter how good the care was that the child got while I was there. And while I’ve done the right thing in putting a support worker in place for her I had to do that because she was not dealing well with my having been hospitalised, which won’t look good to the Courts either. The fear that something might happen and the thoughts about being a terrible parent are swirling around in my head right now.

So all this, plus various other stressors, no sleep and work stuff going on means I am in a very vulnerable place right now. The potential for things to go pear shaped is pretty high. I know this is when I am supposed to switch from distress tolerance into my crisis plan but I have thoughts going around in my head about how it would be easier and feel better to drink and cut. I don’t want to talk to my family tomorrow or tell them how bad things are because I feel like that’s all I do. I lean on them a lot at the moment and I don’t want to.

I need to concentrate on the basics which are eat, sleep and exercise. Hopefully this wekend I can be more sensible about getting these done and pull things back from the brink.

BPD and me – Emotional dysregulation

It’s been a really long time since I wrote and a lot has happened in that time. I stopped writing when I ended up on the psychiatric ward twice in March, and it’s taken a while to recover.
I am planning to write about what happened and the last two months, but in the mean time here is the first part of a series of posts I have written called BPD and me.

BPD and me

BPD at it’s core is behaviour that alternates between extremes. My emotions often feel like I am stuck in the middle of a storm, being pulled this way and that. My emotions appear out of nowhere and can go from 0 to 100 in 2 seconds flat. I often don’t know what’s triggered the strong emotion in the moment, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out how to pin point the trigger. Because I have no control over my emotions I also feel like I have no control over the behaviour I have in reaction to them. The wild, angry, impulsive behaviour is an attempt to gain control over the emotion. I am aware that I can be full of rage, unpredictable and volatile. And I am ashamed by it and always vow to do better. Then I get triggered again and the same cycle repeats. I am not deliberately trying to hurt or upset anyone.

Borderline Personality Disorder basically means I exhibit a chronic pattern of behaviours based in my personality, which essentially means they affect everything: moods, actions and relationships. There are 9 main diagnostic criteria and a number of subgroups of the disorder. This means no one person with BPD is alike.

Extra sensitive and highly reactive emotions – Emotional dysregulation

I have emotional dysregulation which means I am at the mercy of my highly tuned emotional system all the time. It’s like taking a bath in boiling water that everyone else insists is lukewarm. You might feel a twinge of irritation but an emotionally dysregulated person feels instant rage. Something that might make you feel slightly embarrassed might send me off to drink shots of vodka and/or cut myself to obliterate the feeling of overwhelming shame.

People with BPD have emotions that come up quickly and change quickly. I can flip from laughing and happy to shame and then anger and then sadness in a very short space of time and those emotions are very intense.

My emotions can also last for a lot longer than other people’s do. A vivid memory for me is going to the movies to see ‘The Book Thief’. If you’ve seen it you know it is a sad movie but not probably the saddest you’ve ever seen. For me, I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I cried for two solid hours afterwards. So hard that I burst blood vessels in my eye. At one point I struggled to breathe because I was crying so hard. I ended up having to drive to my parents house and they sat one on each side of me, holding on to me while I had a big meltdown over it. I remember Dad being so baffled, he kept asking me what was wrong and I just kept repeating the movie was so sad. He said “But you’ve seen sad movies before….’. Yes, I have, and they don’t all do that to me. But on that day, that one triggered extreme emotions in me and I didn’t have the capacity to deal with it.

Shame is something I feel very strongly and is a big trigger for me. It reinforces those experiences from my childhood that taught me that there was something wrong with me. In the scenario above, I felt a huge amount of shame for over reacting so much to a movie. It wasn’t that my parents did anything wrong. But my Dad’s confusion triggered shame in me, because I felt that my reaction was wrong or bad as it was so out of proportion. I didn’t understand why I was so emotional, and neither did they. Through this misunderstanding I felt invalidated and very deeply shamed by the strength of my emotional outpouring. It took me a long time to understand that invalidating experiences can be ones like these where people I love are trying to help me and inadvertently reinforcing my negative self beliefs. And this comes back to my being extra sensitive – my emotions are dysregulated, therefore my reactions are quick, intense and out of proportion to what others would do. People’s confused reactions can invalidate my experiences (Like the bath – it’s not that hot, its only lukewarm, what is your problem?!) and cause shame, which perpetuates the cycle.

Sometimes I can appear emotionless as I have learnt to squash my emotional sensitivity in certain situations because of the disastrous consequences that it has had in the past. Subconsciously I’ve learnt “emotions are bad, I shouldn’t have them” and so when I have big emotions I try and suppress them which usually results in an eruption at a later date. Often this will happen in the context of work, where something will trigger me but I will try and not react till I am ‘safe’ at home. When my daughter was younger (and even now) I tried to avoid letting her see me cry. So I suppressed anything upsetting. For a long time (years) this meant I couldn’t cry. I’d done such a good job at suppressing upsetting emotions that they came out as anger and rage and impulsive actions rather than sadness and tears. This ultimately is what lead to my biggest major depressive episode aka ‘my breakdown’ in 2013.

In my next post I will explore another of the subgroups of the disorder.

Until next time….

Ka kite anō

Tattoos and the Pink Panther

I’ve been thinking of getting a new tattoo. I already have two – the ironman symbol just above my ankle and the word courage written on my wrist. I did ironman in 2008 (ironman is a long distance triathlon – 3.8km swim, 180km cycle and then a full marathon 42.2km run) so that tattoo commemerated the achievement. The word Courage is a reminder to keep picking myself up and trying again and again even when things are difficult and I want to opt out. I read a quote once that said something like
“The greatest victory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”. So I have courage written on my wrist not just to remind myself to keep going, but also to acknowledge all the times when I have fallen and picked myself back up again.

For my next tattoo I was originally thinking of two things which are symbolic to a lot of people. A lotus flower grows and blooms in muddy water. It symbolises new beginings and the ability to rise above obstacles. The hummingbird represents overcoming difficult times and can also mean joy and hope. They are beautiful birds and I also love the colours of their feathers. Of course there are other interpretations of these two things but to me, together the lotus flower and hummingbird would mean acknowledging the difficult times I’ve been through with my mental health, the growth I’ve achieved and the hope I have for the future. However….once I started looking around at ideas I realised how many people have this same idea and started wondering whether I would be better with something more personal to me.

So what I am thinking about at the moment is the Pink Panther (cartoon character) as an artist like he appears in either The Pink Painter Show (season 1, episode 14), or The Pink Painter in the 1993 series.

The Pink Panther is pretty special to me. When I was little my godfather brought me a soft toy one back from England. I never had a teddy bear, just my Pinky as I called him. He was what I cuddled when I went to bed, and what I reached for when I was upset. Then, when I got married, I was given a large pink panther on my wedding day as a gift by my immediate family. My support crew for Ironman all wore pink t-shirts with a picture of Pink Panther on them and “Go Iron-Cat” on the back. And a few years ago when I finally had to throw my childhood Pink Panther out because the his fur had rotted and all the stuffing fell out, my daughter gave me a new posable soft toy which sits in my room.

I thought it would be pretty cool if I could somehow incorporate my past (symbolised by Pink Panther) and what I’ve learnt (being art – I had lessons when I was unable to work during the first of my major episodes) into a tattoo. Then I remembered seeing the Pink Panther as an artist several times and so that idea has been floating around in my head for a bit. Not sure where I’d put it – I’m thinking lower left leg as my ironman symbol is on my lower right leg. I still have to be careful about covering things up for work as I’m a professional and meet with clients all the time, but lower leg tends to go unnoticed and can easily be covered by pants if I have to. Might be time to go and talk to a tattoo artist and see what ideas come up…

On BPD, anger and depression

Things haven’t been going too well for me mental health wise in the last couple of weeks. Having BPD makes it hard for me to control my emotions, and my highs and lows tend to be much greater. Couple that with a tendency towards depression, and an Aspie brain, and you can see why my mental health seems to be a roller coaster ride most of the time.

I refer to my lows as episodes, much like someone with bipolar probably would do. During a low I can be extremely depressed, suicidal, indulge in various self harming behaviours, angry, emotional, belligerent, argumentative, manipulative….you get the idea. It’s not pleasant for me or for anyone around me and it does a whole lot of damage to my life which I have to try and repair when I am well again. It’s also very frustrating for me, because often I am aware I am acting badly but lack the skills to do anything but react.

One of the things I have been struggling with most during this particular low is anger. Often having a low with strong anger as the dominant feeling means a depressive episode is on the way. This is because as the anger or rage causes me to do things that I regret, I start hating myself for being like this. This begins a cycle of thought about how I am not trying hard enough, people would be better off without me, I’m not good enough, I’m a horrible parent/family member/friend/person in general. Then leads on to thoughts of death and finally suicidal ideation. Occasionally I hallucinate if I get really emotionally fraught – I have gone for bush walks and thought I have seen bodies hanging in the trees.

So the anger I have been feeling this time has scared me. I have had several severe major episodes in the last 3.5 years and every time it is a long hard journey to climb out of that hole and keep living. My daughter has been and continues to be my reason for living, for climbing out of bed every day even when things were at their worst. But returning to a place where you can see a future again and have a little hope takes a lot of hard work. Severe depression is unlike mild and moderate depression in that the traditional things that doctors recommend don’t work, at least initially. No matter how much exercise, good food, quality sleep, social connection etc you get, your whole life basically falls into a pit of doom and you become unable to do the most basic of things for yourself. At my worst I couldn’t read or watch TV because there was too much effort involved in concentrating and trying to understand the plot, and my ability to speak was severely impaired because I had trouble following conversation and forming opinion.

I think what I also find hard about anger as a dominant symptom of a low is that it makes me inclined to be extremely difficult to deal with as a patient. As much as I need help I will take offence to suggestions or instructions from my nursing case manager and my psychologist. I will feel like nothing anyone suggests is good enough and I will interpret attempts to help me as “people interfering” or them “telling me what to do”. I vocalise this opinion to the people involved and I have been effectively fired as a patient by several psychiatrists and one psychologist for becoming angry and verbally agressive in appointments (just to clarify – I’ve never hurt anyone, just damaged the patient/therapist relationship).

I am currently receiving DBT therapy for my BPD and have made huge improvement in a number of areas. But anger still remains one of the emotions I find hardest to control.

For whatever reason, this morning I woke feeling better than I have done in a while. Work was busy but not as stressful as it usually is, and after work Little G and I went to a local swimming pool. We bumped into friends and she played with their girls while I chatted to the mums, then Little G and I swam laps together. After dinner her and I walked to the dairy for an ice cream and sat in the park to eat them. Her and I sat in companionable silence and I tried to just be in the moment, enjoying the last of the evening sun and the taste of the ice cream and the company of my child. I think my peace is slowly starting to return. I am hoping that I hit the bottom of the low and because I am getting better at resisting self harming urges and limiting angry outbursts, it hasn’t lasted as long as it normally would.

I’ll leave you with the lyrics from one of my favourite Six60 songs, and in their words “Ain’t it good to be alive?” That might be a strange thing to say when I’ve just spent this post telling you the difficulties of mental illness, but I believe that I wouldn’t be the person I was if I was not forced to face these challenges.

SIX60 LYRICS

“Only To Be”

Only to be, I live in expectancy
No wonder it feels like this wasn’t meant for me
Though my mind is so confined
That there ain’t no point in reasoning,
Now that it’s clear to see,
It was all in front of me
And I’m right where I’m supposed to be

Yeah yea, I’ll live just turning pages
Yeah, well I know that it’s worth the ride
Ain’t it good to be alive?

So what will it be?
My dreams are my company
To lose what is me,
I follow the path I see.
My mind is so confined
That I don’t even know where to begin.
But it took me so long to find
That I can leave it all behind.
Cause I don’t got everything I’d ever need

Yeah yea, I’ll live just turning pages
Yeah, well I know that it’s worth the ride
Ain’t it good to be alive?

Cause only to be,
Was all that you’ve got from me
You told me it’s real,
And nothing comes easily.
Cause that was the truth, I was losing all my youth
To a world that’s fit for someone else

Yeah, I’ll live just turning pages
Yeah, well I know that it’s worth the ride
Yeah, I’ll live just turning pages, yeah
Yeah, but I know it was worth the ride
Ain’t it good to be alive?

Opening post – introductions, dementia and death

So…this is my first post. I didn’t intend to start a blog tonight. I had to sign up because Little G’s homework included her commenting on one of her classmate’s blogs. I’ve always wanted to have a go myself so here I am.

A little bit about myself and my life would probably be in order right now I guess. I’m a single mother in my 30’s with one daughter (Little G) age 8, who is the light of my life. I have a busy professional job and I work full time. I also have severe recurrent major depressive disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and Aspergers. Little G has multiple diagnoses including ASD (the modern term for Aspergers), auditory processing disorder, anxiety, hypermobility of almost all her joints, mild low muscle tone, and sensory processing disorder. She’s also gifted, with an IQ in the range of 145 – 150.

As well as my professional job I dabble in art when I have the time. I am current trying arcrylic and coloured pencil, but prefer detailed pencil portraits. I’ve also worked in watercolour. Tonight I am working on an arcrylic of a river scene. The painting’s got to that awkward stage where it looks ugly and I want to give up so I’ve put it down for a bit. Usually that just means the detail needs to go on and it will start looking a bit more like what it’s meant to.

On a different topic entirely, my grandmother died in December and Little G and I went down (travelled about 5 hours in the car) to the internment of the ashes in the weekend just been. Unlike her death and funeral it was just so hard for me to feel any emotion. The plaque is nice, and its nice to have something in memorial to her and my granddad, but I couldn’t really feel attached to it at all. Once the body is ashes it loses its meaning for me. I think maybe because it’s so at odds with my memories of her that my brain can’t really process that the box of ashes is what’s left of her.

My gran died of dementia which is such a cruel illness. Last year wasn’t a great year for my family. January my Dad’s Dad died of Alzheimer’s and December my Mum’s Mum died of dementia. Poppa had been going downhill for a long time and suffered several bouts of pneumonia, and then he lost the ability to form words and speak. After that it wasn’t that long before he couldn’t swallow and he had no control over most of his muscles. It was pretty horrifying sitting there watching his eyes roll back up in his head constantly and his mouth hang open and then keep snapping shut. His mouth had to be swabbed regularly to keep getting some moisture into him because he couldn’t swallow. And of course all his dignity was long gone as bowel and bladder control was one of the first things to go, after his memory. It’s just such a sad thing to sit there with someone who once commanded troops, ran a thriving business, had a dairy farm and five boys, and all the rest, and watch him essentially lose every function he’d gained since the day he was conceived.

My Gran’s demise was just as horrifying but in slightly different ways. She had been in secure dementia care for about 3 years (my Poppa was also in secure care), and fell and broke her hip back in about July/August. From there she gave up the will to live. Going into hospital frightened her and she refused to take pain relief or even to eat or drink. She would not do the physio or get up out of bed and try to walk. The pain confused her because she could not understand that’s what the feeling was, or associate taking pain relief medication with expecting to feel better. She just knew there were feelings, she didn’t like them, so she wanted to be left alone because she was scared and confused. Once back at her care home she never really left her bed. She refused food and drink and her insides started basically breaking down. She took sips of water after a bit, and the odd teaspoon of icecream, but she could go days without anything. She started hallucinating. Sometimes her speech was clear and her legs would move around involuntarily (something to do with twitching because of the minerals leeching from her system). Sometimes she barely opened her eyes and her speech was garbled and unintelligible.

I never realised how long you could go without food and water if you are taking a few sips and mouthfuls here and there. Gran lasted roughly 2 -2.5 months of just a little food and water, and then about a week of none.

The end was so sad. We were chatting to her and each other around her bedside. The whole family were there – her 3 kids, her son-in-law & daughter-in-law, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. We took turns sitting by her and stroking her hand. Then her breathing changed and stopped. Just like that she was gone. Suddenly there is just a body and no person in it. It’s a bizzare feeling, knowing that even though they are right there in front of you they will never open their eyes or say anything to you again.

Anyway, enough about death. I didn’t start writing tonight with the intention of telling my grandparents’ stories but it feels cathartic. There is plenty of other things I’d like to say about dementia, death and my grandparents but I’ll leave it with this little picture.