Perspectives…

Psychological and philosophical point of view, brought to you in plain language…

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The sound of goodbye: Last scene

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The last scene

If you ask people: What do you regret most? The things you did or the things you didn`t do, they answer, with longing, the things they  didn`t do. When looking back, the things you didn`t say or do, linger on. The silence can speaks so loud and haunt you in the quiet night. Luckily, many have tought me this valuable lesson, and today I can`t thank them enough. When the bridge bridge collapsed under my feet, they stood there as I rebuilt it, stone by stone. I didn`t always realize it since fog hid their beautiful faces, but I always recognized them in the end. They saved me enough to see and take an outstretched hand when I needed it.

Some didn`t have pillars of safety to stand on when they built their lives. So what about them? What about those who couldn`t let their tears flow when they wanted? How can I ever compare my experiences to that? The lack of scaffolding must feel like swimming without seeing land. “True”, you might say, but this can bring out incredible strength in people. “True”, I`d answer with a sad voice. “But it still drains their energy for such a long time”. “And what about those who lose their lives in the effort? How many had to let go right before they reached the shore?

I have no answers, but I do have my ability to ask since they didn`t take that away from me. My gift is to give back what I got to show my appreciation and gratitude. I`ll promise to give as much as I got with the warmth of this truth energizing me forever.

Who knows? One day one of them might feel as touched as me when I stretch out my hand and they take it. What if they one day get the chance to think like I do? In an integrative blender my thoughts and feelings have intermingled until this simple truth came out: If this isn`t nice, then I don`t know what is.

Weekly Writing Challenge: Golden Year

Sugababes – Sound Of Goodbye

High suicide rates

Psychology Today

Mirrorgirl

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Honoring the obligation to ourselves – to a good life with meaning….

 

This short excerpt (a moment really) from an interview with A.C. Grayling, philosopher and author, captures so very much about creating meaning in one’s life…and celebrating each day. 

With the interview coming to a close, I decide to pose one final question. What’s the secret to the good and happy life? I half-expect him to pause for thought, but Grayling bursts with effervescence:

“It’s being engaged, it’s having a project, it’s being outward-looking. I think it was Emerson who said that a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.” I’m intrigued to discover that taxi drivers, upon discovering his profession, often quiz him on the meaning of life. “And I say, the meaning of life is what you make it. There will be as many different meaningful lives as there are people to live them.” It’s an incredibly positive and open-minded outlook. He closes by reminding me that “if we honor the obligation we have to ourselves to develop, to the best of our ability, the constellation of interests and passions and talents that we have—even if we don’t succeed, never win a gold medal, never get knighted, never get published—that in itself is the good life.”

As I stroll out of the Bloomsbury café in which we’ve been sitting for the past hour or so and head off towards the train station, I finally feel that I have some sense of what Bertrand Russell meant when he said that most people would rather die than think. Thought can be scary, even iconoclastic. It can make us feel desperate and hopeless. And yet despite that, as evidenced by people like Grayling, thought and reflection can invest our lives with something more than hope, and more than wishful thinking: with meaning.

– See more at: http://thehumanist.org/january-february-2013/spare-a-thought-for-philosophy-an-interview-with-a-c-grayling/#sthash.M109lQUt.dpuf

 

Benjamin Fry and depression

‘I had a golden life, so why was I falling apart?’: TV psychotherapist Benjamin Fry was devastated by depression. Then he discovered a radical new treatment

By Benjamin Fry

PUBLISHED: 23:01 GMT, 27 July 2013 | UPDATED: 23:01 GMT, 27 July 2013

Eton- and Oxford-educated, a millionaire by 30 – psychotherapist Benjamin had every advantage. But when he suffered a breakdown and all treatment failed, he had to delve into his childhood to unlock its cause

 

‘Only the thought of my children stopped me from killing myself’

Your life looks fine – even enviable – on the surface. But underneath you are more stressed and anxious than anyone realises. You’ve been called ‘oversensitive’ or accused of ‘overreacting’ because the setbacks and stresses that other people seem to take in their stride can knock you for six. You’ve also been told that you are attractive, bright, full of potential, yet somehow you have failed to find real success in relationships or work.

You are not weak or lazy or self-pitying. You are overwhelmed; stuck in a state of anxiety that has been massively misunderstood and wrongly diagnosed. The good news is that there is a radical and transformative new way of understanding it, and of getting yourself unstuck, for good.

I know what this feels like. I was ‘stuck’ myself for years until, in 2008, I suffered a complete breakdown. I looked like an unlikely candidate for a breakdown. I was a trained psychotherapist and a privileged person in many ways.

I grew up in a wealthy family, went to Eton and Oxford, my first job was as a teenage model for Mario Testino and then I became a successful nightclub entrepreneur. By 30 I had made my first million, married a wonderful woman and was living in a big house with a much-loved child, the first of five. It looked like a golden life, but inside I was falling apart.

I trained as a psychotherapist, treating patients in my own practice and working on TV programmes such as Freaky Eaters and Spendaholics. But I always felt as if I didn’t properly ‘belong’ with my colleagues. Many of my patients generously told me that I had helped them, but the truth was that I understood them because I was exactly like them, full of anxiety, unhappiness and isolation.

What was wrong with me? I had lost my mother, who died from aplastic anaemia when I was 11 months old. For the next two years I lived with family friends while my father rebuilt his life and career. He would visit me regularly, and after he remarried he took me to live with him and his new wife.

Our early years are fundamentally important in our emotional development, so I was always aware that my mother’s death had scarred me, and that early experience had contributed to my anxiety. But I loved my father and went on to have a successful life, so though I was never glib enough to say I had ‘got over’ that loss, I believed I had survived it.

By 2008, my golden life was unravelling. My wife was pregnant with our fifth child, and I was in deep trouble. I had made a series of property speculations in Greece that crashed badly and ruined us financially.

We had to leave our home, rent a smaller place out of London and beg my father to bail us out of our huge debts. Poor me, eh? I know that this isn’t the worst problem someone can have. I had the privilege of a safety net, and if I’d made money before, maybe I could make it again. But I didn’t see it that way. It felt utterly overwhelming and devastating and sent me into a spiral of worry which led to serious clinical anxiety and depression, and finally into a suicidal despair because nobody could help me recover. Only the thought of my children stopped me from killing myself.

I tried everything: my doctor, the NHS, the church, the Priory – I even tried a faith healer. Nothing worked. I was well-informed and well-connected, but I discovered a massive failure in our therapy system, which repeatedly misdiagnosed me, or just medicated me, which often made me worse. 

Finally, after a series of therapeutic failures and disasters, I found myself at Mellody House in Arizona, where I discovered what was really wrong with me and what had been wrong with me all my life. I was suffering from post-traumatic stress. The death of my mother at such a young age had sent me into deep trauma, and rather than recovering from it, it had ‘frozen’ inside me.

‘This “frozen” trauma is stored up in childhood and then triggered in adult life by a new stress’

Trauma is not a word most of us use about the bad things that happen to us. We think it refers only to extremes, such as soldiers in a combat zone. But so far as our minds and, crucially, our bodies are concerned, trauma means anything that causes us stress so overwhelming that our physical response to it is to ‘freeze’ – think of a rabbit caught in headlights and unable to move.

This ‘frozen’ material is usually stored up in childhood and then triggered in adult life by a new stress, such as a bereavement, a break-up, a car accident or a redundancy – the kind of stresses that we’ll all experience at least once in our lives. Most of us recover fully from our traumas, but some of us don’t. Why some of us don’t, what happens to us as a result and how we can heal is at the heart of the new science of trauma. Mellody House had created a radical new understanding of the causes of psychological distress that many therapists believe is the greatest leap forward in this field in our lifetime.

 

 

Benjamin at the age of 18, modelling for Mario Testino, left, his stepmother Jane, half-sister Annabelle, and father Charles, right

This new model of thinking was mainly pioneered by a man called Peter Levine, who spent years studying the habits of wild animals under stress. Imagine a young gazelle, grazing peacefully with his herd, when a lion appears.

We’ve all heard of the fight-or-flight response: when the threat is too big to fight, the gazelle runs for his life. As the lion bears down, Peter Levine noticed that often the gazelle would suddenly drop to the ground, as if shot, moments before the lion caught him. About to be caught and killed, he ‘freezes’. But sometimes the lion keeps running – there are other, fatter gazelles to chase – and the gazelle would wake from his frozen state and escape. But before he did, he would behave in an odd way, shaking and twitching all over.

Over time, Levine realised what was happening: the flight response floods the gazelle’s body with hormones and stress energy to enable him to run for his life. If the threat is removed, that energy is no longer needed and the body discharges it – the gazelle would do this by shaking and twitching his body. All animals instinctively process their trauma. But humans are too self-conscious, too ‘clever’ to act like the frozen gazelle, who shook and twitched and shuddered his way out of the trauma once he came to.

Our sophisticated brain tells us that this is ‘crazy’ behaviour, disturbing for us and for those around us, especially when there is no visible threat in sight. Instead we push it down, take a pill, think or talk our way around it, and tell ourselves we’re fine. We may have rationalised it, but that energy – crying out for release – is stuck.

‘It takes support, patience and love to recover from trauma, but it can be done’

Perhaps our first big stress happened, as it did to me, when we were very young and we simply weren’t able to process it thoroughly. Or it felt so overwhelming, we didn’t manage to discharge that stress energy fully.

Having begun with animals, Peter Levine went on to test this theory with patients and found again and again that problems such as extreme emotional sensitivity, anxiety, depression, and many behaviours, such as obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality and eating disorders and other addictions, could all be traced back to a frozen trauma.

If we think of our bodies as a measuring jug, that original threatening event filled us almost to the brim with stress energy. Any new stresses – even small ones – quickly cause our stress to spill over, which is why we can so quickly become anxious and overwhelmed. This kind of anxiety and stress are not just emotions, but physical responses trapped in our nervous systems. Peter Levine discovered that if he could help his patients discharge that energy, he could reset their stress gauge and help them heal.

That was the treatment I received in Mellody House, where they had been pioneering this new model of trauma treatment in a residential setting for more than seven years. It changed my life, and inspired me to set up a clinic in the UK to replicate that treatment over here. I’ve seen many examples of frozen trauma, and how it damages people’s lives.

OTHER EXAMPLES

Sarah, in her late 30s, came to our outpatient clinic in London because her second marriage was on the verge of collapse, and so was she. Only recently married, she was driving her husband away with her rages and ‘withdrawing’ behaviour. This had been a pattern for all of Sarah’s relationships. She’d fall quickly and deeply in love, convinced that this person was her soulmate, and lavish them with attention. But once the relationship was established, she constantly tested this love with cruel behaviour. When he grew angry or distant in return, she’d despair, feeling abandoned and terrified.

Sarah’s mother had a difficult labour with her first child and she didn’t want any more children – Sarah was an unplanned pregnancy. Sarah absorbed her mother’s feelings of rejection, which continued during her childhood. Although fed and cared for, she never felt loved or wanted. This long-term lack of safety overwhelmed her system and so traumatised her, and that trauma had frozen.

In adult life, she set people up to reject her, and every new disappointment brought her closer to a breakdown.

My clinic uses several methods for unblocking trauma, but to begin we talk about earlier experiences and feelings. Instead of dwelling on the events, I ask the patient to observe how their body feels. Sarah became aware of her clenched body language, and of how her stomach would feel tight as she discussed her mother. The big breakthrough with this therapy is understanding that the stress is a biological one, so although I don’t touch my patients, the therapies we use –sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic experiencing – focus on physical sensation.

Patients will usually observe a physical response as energy is released. Some will feel warm – they may break into a sweat – or cold. Twitching and shaking are common. We treat the nervous system, not the past, which can’t be changed but can lose its power to control our lives.

We treated Sarah just like a fallen gazelle, and like a gazelle, her biology was intelligent enough to do its work once we opened up the pathway. Once released from her trauma, Sarah’s rages and terror of abandonment disappeared, and she has a very different approach to relationships.

Another patient, Kate, treated at our residential clinic in Oxford, told me how every time she thought she was ‘in trouble’ with authority figures – such as being late for work – her heart would race and her chest feel tight. Her fear of people with power over her stemmed from her early life with strict parents and an even stricter school.

Constantly in flight mode throughout her childhood, she had built up too much stress energy to discharge it properly, and the frozen stress haunted her interactions as an adult. In a case like this, it’s helpful to stop worrying about the ‘trouble’ and observe your reactions. Instead of saying ‘my boss is making me crazy’, think, ‘I notice when my boss gives me a look; I instantly experience worry and stress.’

Now see if you can identify the physical sensation that goes with this feeling. As you do, you start to connect with the deep mammal instinct that knows how to let go of that stress response, and if you are lucky, or after you have practised this for a while, you may notice a response in your body, such as trembling or other form of energetic release. You may feel an emotion connected with this – sadness, anger – or you may even cry. This is what happens as the trauma thaws and passes.

HOW YOU CAN HELP YOURSELF

For temporary relief

• Smells such as aromatherapy oils are the quickest way into our nervous systems.
• Press your feet into the ground and feel the size and strength of the earth: it tells our body that we are ‘grounded’.
• Breathe through your nose and exhale slowly through the mouth. This mimics the body’s response to rest and safety.

For longer term help

• Read Waking The Tiger by Peter Levine. It explains this new understanding of trauma; he also has a CD to guide you through the process.
• Notice your physical sensations rather than your thoughts as much as possible.
• Traditional exercises, such as yoga and meditation, can help reduce the impact of the mind and get us into our body.

For professional help

• Find a practitioner in somatic experiencing (seauk.org.uk), or sensorimotor psychotherapy (sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org), or contact Khiron House (see below).

 

While self-help is possible for many of us (see above right), for deeper or very stuck traumas, it is too difficult to try to manage this process alone. Cara came to see me with a history of bulimia and self-harming. She had been sexually abused as a child and her early adult life had been dominated by a heroic attempt to overcome her history and not be defined by it. S

he worked at a bank, bought a house and earned a lot of money. But always anxious, she abused food and alcohol, before her increasingly black depressions undermined her career and the self-harming started. In early sessions she curled up in a chair in the foetal position, and our first job was to make her feel safe.

We worked with a happier memory from her childhood – a best friend whose family welcomed Cara to stay in their loving home – and this became her safe place to go to when she felt overwhelmed. Releasing trauma too quickly can be retraumatising so has to be managed carefully. It doesn’t matter what happened, only that the stress is frozen. So one person from a war and another from a dysfunctional family may have the same symptoms. Our nervous system can’t distinguish between a car accident or a person – it just understands threat, and the same stress energy floods our system.

This is the big difference between this treatment and conventional talking therapies, especially those that try to ‘retrain our thoughts’. Our thoughts are not the main problem (although they can then contribute to it) – they are a symptom of a deeper cause. We need to tap into the deep ‘mammal brain’, which is part of all of us, below the rational level, to the sensing, nonverbal place where the damage is stored. After eight weeks in residential treatment, Cara still had work to do but looked, moved and felt like a completely different person.

My story ended happily too. I went through multiple stages of both physical and emotional releases: shaking, twitching, deep grief, sadness, loss and anger. My children were delighted to have their father back, but it had taken a toll on both my marriage and my children. Trauma always affects those around us as well as ourselves. My illness and absence, which they have experienced as an abandonment, along with their fear that I was so ill I might die and never return, upset my family deeply. Having seen how well I was doing with this therapy, though, some of them have also had the treatment to recover from the trauma of this passage of our lives.

They are all doing much better. It takes support, patience and love to recover from trauma, but it can be done. Feeling overwhelmed does not have to rule your life or be a permanent part of it. Somewhere, something happened to you that caused you a huge stress, and you have been unable to release that trauma. But our bodies are wise, they know exactly what to do – they have been doing it for millions of years. All we need to do is get out of our own way and let that happen. I did it, and so can you. The rewards are life changing.

Benjamin Fry is the founder of Khiron House, a residential clinic in Oxford and an outpatient service in Harley Street, London, tel: 020 7754 0477, khironhouse.com

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2376132/TV-psychotherapist-Benjamin-Fry-devastated-depression-Then-discovered-radical-new-treatment.html#ixzz2gSxby8gS
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Related articles

• WATCH: Trauma expert helps PTSD patients with trembling exercises (globalnews.ca)
• 18 minutes of trauma (forfreepsychology.wordpress.com)
• Early Childhood Trauma: How Parents Can Help (psychologytoday.com)
• Letter to a young student #9 (psychologytoday.com)
• “Our Sorrows & Wounds are Healed, Only When We Touch Them with Compassion.” – Buddha: A Look into Group Therapy and Trauma (acrouse343.wordpress.com)
• Trauma can be treated, but not erased | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (theguardian.com)

Freezing trauma

Unfortunately, not everyone are born with the same chances to thrive and grow like others. In fact, Norway is one of the lucky countries, and I have discovered time and time again, that being brought up here, is really like winning the lottery. But: Don`t let that fool you; Mental health is a huge problem here, as in many countries. Many live with severe problems and have not had the scaffolding they needed when they grew up.

I will continue this post with sharing more information about a topic I am very concerned about, since I work with it daily. The subject is trauma and dissociation, and I have chosen to reblog a post from a woman who must fight every day, against every type of challenge in the world. Please know that this entry might be triggering for others who have experienced trauma, and keep from reading it if you are at a bad place right now. Thank you for your respect.

Nina, clinical psychologist

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Fight, Flight or Freeze?

Posted on August 24, 2013 by brokenbutbeingrepaired

http://traumahealing.com/images/pptSlide02.gif

Don’t know about you, but we/I are firmly in the freeze camp.

Always have been.

A few years ago, I had some sort of assessment done by a Psychiatrist who drew up a diagram showing the window of tolerance see here for more info.

She said that in her opinion, I was functioning in a state of hypoarousal.
Which means I’m at the bottom end of the chart. When I was officially given the D.I.D diagnosis, H said the same.

Some traumatised people are in a permanent state of hyper-arousal which is where the fight /flight response comes in. An example being that when in a situation that is perceived as threatening, a person may display extreme rage and aggression. However, when a person reacts with hypoarousal, they become quieter, may appear depressed, and withdraw. ( see here for further information.. ).

The freeze response is where I am.
It is a pretty regular thing for me to ‘find myself’ unable to move sitting curled up behind my bathroom door.
I shut down when in a situation that feels threatening (note, just because it feelsthreatening doesn’t mean it actually is). ‘Playing dead’ was what I did during traumatic experiences, and what I continue to do. Fighting and fleeing were not options. Theyshould be now though, I think.

While I recognise the reasoning for the freeze response, I also see that it causes huge problems in my day to day life.
I am not alone with this way of responding. It seems that it is the response of most of the rest of me, if not all.

Am beginning to accept that during time loss especially those times where I have evidence of having been out (where?) and being with (abusive?) people, that freeze response may have heightened risk rather than lowered it.

Now, I think (?) we need to learn how to fight and how to flee when in genuinely threatening situations. We also need to learn how to tolerate things that feel threatening but are not. Am not sure if that is possible since it seems from what I’ve read that those responses are learned during very early childhood.

Really hope this makes sense.
Thank you for reading.

sources http://www.kimberlyschmidtbevans.com/1/post/2013/06/the-window-of-tolerance-edges-of-growth.html

http://www.voice-dialogue-inner-self-awareness.com/dtd.html

http://www.sensorimotorpsychotherapy.org/images/trauma_fig2.gif

Posted in Dissociative Identity Disorder, Ritual Abuse | Tagged D.I.D, developmental trauma, fight, flight, freeze,hypoarousal, play dead, programming, R.A, trauma, window of tolerance | 30 Comments

Related articles

• The Freeze Response (jovannaharris.wordpress.com)
• Effects on Sexuality of Childhood Trauma (childhoodtraumarecovery.com)

The daily headache

Every day someone lives in pain. Sometimes it is physical torment, and sometimes it`s mental agony. A memory can harm as well as knives and blows. I want to present a blog from Ashana. She grew up with no safety net, and it is almost impossible to imagine how that must have been. But we have to. We can`t close our eyes. Stories like her, make me want to fight for a better world.

Ashana, thank you so much for sharing your story. Sending you warm thoughts.

Nina, psychologist

Have you had yours?

• Child abuse
• Cults
• Dissociation
• Education
• Humor
• Psychology
• Sex trafficking
• Trauma
• Understanding evil
• Personality Disorders
• Religion
• Writing

• A Brief Introduction
• About This Blog
• A Return to Words

About This Blog

August 6th, a lone gunman toting two semi-automatic weapons killed seven people and wounded a number of others at a crowded Sikh temple in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A few weeks before, a man opened fire in a theater in Colorado, killing 12 and wounded 58 others. The first instance is classified as a hate crime. The second appears to be entirely random—murder for the sake of it.

These are difficult and frightening times we live in.  Much of the Middle East has become destabilized, with civil war raging in Syria and smoldering in Egypt. Terrorist attacks and sectarian violence have become so commonplace in Afghanistan and Iraq it no longer seems to be news. Bombs planted in war-torn Chechnya, where violence has erupted sporadically since the start of the First Chechen War in 1994, reportedly killed four individuals on the same day as the gurudwara shooting. Meanwhile, the Indian Mujahideen struck in Pune on August 1st, when serial explosions rocked Jangli Maharaj Road. The world has become a terrifying place.

Or has it? Is this really anything new?

The aftermath of the 2010 German Bakery bombing in Pune.

What about the 500,000-100,000 murdered in Rwanda in 1994? The 200,000 killed in Bosnia’s “ethnic cleansing” between 1992 and 1995? The 2 million executed, starved, or worked to death in Cambodia starting in 1975? The .5 million hacked to death or burned alive during Partition? Or, for heaven’s sake, the 11 million who died during the Holocaust under Nazi rule? And going back to perhaps one of the first genocides of the 20th century, the mass killings of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turkish beginning in 1915? What about them?

Targets change, weapons improve, but ordinary people are now and always have been quite capable of torture and mass murder. Evil, it seems, is part of the human heart.

In saying this, I am not arguing that we are all just sinners, hopelessly seduced by that devil. Evil, at least in my mind, is a complicated matter. It is worth making an effort to understand  These are my questions:

Why do some people carry out evil acts?

Why do some engage in more extreme acts of evil than others?

Why do these events occur more at some times than others?

How is it that some people—and not others—take a stand against evil, often at great personal risk to themselves?

This Travelodge in Oceanside was shut down in 2011 because of its use in sex trafficking by gang members.

Since I was about 13 years old, I have been deeply and abidingly interested in these questions. While an adolescent Stephen Hawking may have started searching for a unified theory of physics at that age, I started looking for a unified theory of evil. We need to understand the worlds we live in, and mine was for many years almost unrelentingly evil.

It might help to tell a little of my story. My dad molested me from the time I can remember. When I was two, he raped me with a pair of scissors. Like many sociopaths, he killed animals from time to time—usually in front of me—and at least once insisted I kill as well. His aim was not only to frighten, but to corrupt.

Before I was school-aged, my mother assaulted me multiple times—a few times by strangling, once with a pair of kitchen knives, once with a kitchen chair. I have incoherent memories of being dunked head-first in water—the tub or the toilet. I think she did that. But I don’t know.

To discipline me, one or both of them shut me up in a freezer until I lost consciousness. Alternatively, they chained me blindfolded to a wall in the garage, at times without any clothes on. In the garage, I was fed spoiled food, crawling with bugs, or no food at all and refused access to a toilet.

At the same time, my father was also my pimp. For 11 years, I serviced the perverted desires of pedophiles, mainly in a variety of cheap hotels, but also at home or in the homes of his friends. In addition, I performed sporadically in child pornography—both still and filmed.

I grew up in hell and the devil lived there.

Except these were people. People did these things, and in some cases, a lot of people. Unlike my mother, who acted impulsively and alone, my father was intelligent, organized, and apparently well-connected. For the most part, he abused me in the context of organizations that were systematically abusing other children and employed a variety of people—as actors and film crew, hotel managers, maintenance and janitorial workers, and human traffickers.

This was not simply the product of a single, unbalanced mind going over the edge, nor was it the result of a few people getting greedy and slipping into amoral behavior. There were too many of them—both consumers and producers—for these to be adequately understood as isolated incidents or as the work of the 1% of the population who simply lack conscience. Some of this is about ordinary people committing unbelievably, horrifyingly evil acts..

This blog is not so much the place where I am telling my story, as the place where I work to understand those stories. And also where I try to heal the scars.

Thanks for being here with me.

Sometimes the best people leave us first

–>

Loss. Heart-wrenching pain lurching in every corner. Memories that haunt us, tears that fill oceans. Such is the pain of loosing someone you love, and there is no other way than let them come: The feelings, the memories and the pain. The pain is just a proof of our ability to love, a proof that we can do everything for anyone, if we decide to. The hurt has meaning, and no-one can take that away from us.

 

The following post is from tersia burger: Vic’s final journey.  Vic was the precious daughter of the author of the post, and the blog is about the lifelong battle she had.

Examples on dissociation and more information

dis-so-ci-a-tion: an adaptive defense in response to high stress or trauma characterized by memory loss and a sense of disconnection from oneself or one’s surroundings.

What does this mean to you? Here’s how a cross section of people
who’ve experienced dissociation describe it:

“When I become engrossed in a good book, I lose all track of time.”

–ALICE M., 33, TRAVEL CONSULTANT

“I feel that somehow my body is not doing what my head wants it to be doing.”

–ERNEST P., 51, ENGINEER

“My mind wanders, and I go in and out. I just go away to myself. Nowhere, really, just not there.”

–SANDRA N., 19, COLLEGE STUDENT

“I have trouble remembering what I said in a presentation after I’ve made it.”

–JOHN T., 41, SALES DIRECTOR FOR INTERNET FIRM

“I was at home with my mother, and the whole thing was unreal. I knew she was my mother, but I just had a feeling that she wasn’t really my mother.”

–CINDY M., 32, TELEVISION PRODUCER

“I’m like a filter, who I am on a particular day depends on what’s coming into me and what’s going out. I don’t feel connected internally all the time.”

–JEAN W., 41, BATTERED WOMEN’S COUNSELOR

“I’ll explode at my husband, and afterward I can’t remember what I said.”

–GAYLE T., 32, AEROBICS INSTRUCTOR

“It’s not feeling real or feeling that I’m just doing things automatically.”

–JIM Z., 37, ALCOHOL COUNSELOR

“I feel like a girl most of the time; other times I feel more like a guy.”

–CARLY B., 19, COLLEGE STUDENT

“It’s like watching a movie in my head. You know, like when you’re watching a movie and you get all absorbed in the movie. And you forget who you are, where you are, what time it is, what’s going on in your life.”

–DONNA E., 41, NURSE

“I can become so totally concerned about what people are thinking of me or expecting from me when I’m talking to them that I become lost. I lose me.”

–GEORGE N., 53, FINANCIAL PLANNER

“I couldn’t remember whether it really happened or I imagined it.”

–SUZANNE O., 35, HOMEMAKER

“It’s like being shell-shocked, you know that you’re doing something, but you feel that somebody else is doing it. You’re watching yourself from a distance. Doesn’t everyone have that feeling sometimes?”

–ROBERT A., 51, SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR

“I don’t feel like myself; I feel like some other person inside me.”

–VICKI B., 44, MEDICAL TECHNICIAN

“I didn’t let myself feel anything about my divorce until after I was divorced. The emotional side of me just shuts down under stress.”

–FRED D., 42, BOND RATINGS ANALYST

“I’ve been in a shell, and I feel empty inside.”

–LINDA A., 33, TEACHER

“A very powerful wave of emotion comes over me, and I don’t feel in control of myself. I feel that this person is going to do what she wants and I’m over in a corner, helpless, waiting to see what happens.”

–PENELOPE J., 54, FREE-LANCE WRITER

“I act differently with different people.”

–MARSHA G., 36, FASHION CONSULTANT

         Are you surprised to find that you’ve experienced some of these symptoms of dissociation yourself? You shouldn’t be. The fact is that dissociation is a healthy adaptive defense used almost universally by people in response to overwhelming stress or life-threatening danger. What’s more, many normal people experience mild dissociative symptoms on occasion when their lives are not in immediate danger.

dis-so-ci-a-tion: an adaptive defense in response to high stress or trauma characterized by memory loss and a sense of disconnection from oneself or one’s surroundings.

What does this mean to you? Here’s how a cross section of people
who’ve experienced dissociation describe it:

 

“When I become engrossed in a good book, I lose all track of time.”

–ALICE M., 33, TRAVEL CONSULTANT

“I feel that somehow my body is not doing what my head wants it to be doing.”

–ERNEST P., 51, ENGINEER

“My mind wanders, and I go in and out. I just go away to myself. Nowhere, really, just not there.”

–SANDRA N., 19, COLLEGE STUDENT

“I have trouble remembering what I said in a presentation after I’ve made it.”

–JOHN T., 41, SALES DIRECTOR FOR INTERNET FIRM

“I was at home with my mother, and the whole thing was unreal. I knew she was my mother, but I just had a feeling that she wasn’t really my mother.”

–CINDY M., 32, TELEVISION PRODUCER

“I’m like a filter, who I am on a particular day depends on what’s coming into me and what’s going out. I don’t feel connected internally all the time.”

–JEAN W., 41, BATTERED WOMEN’S COUNSELOR

“I’ll explode at my husband, and afterward I can’t remember what I said.”

–GAYLE T., 32, AEROBICS INSTRUCTOR

“It’s not feeling real or feeling that I’m just doing things automatically.”

–JIM Z., 37, ALCOHOL COUNSELOR

“I feel like a girl most of the time; other times I feel more like a guy.”

–CARLY B., 19, COLLEGE STUDENT

“It’s like watching a movie in my head. You know, like when you’re watching a movie and you get all absorbed in the movie. And you forget who you are, where you are, what time it is, what’s going on in your life.”

–DONNA E., 41, NURSE

“I can become so totally concerned about what people are thinking of me or expecting from me when I’m talking to them that I become lost. I lose me.”

–GEORGE N., 53, FINANCIAL PLANNER

“I couldn’t remember whether it really happened or I imagined it.”

–SUZANNE O., 35, HOMEMAKER

“It’s like being shell-shocked, you know that you’re doing something, but you feel that somebody else is doing it. You’re watching yourself from a distance. Doesn’t everyone have that feeling sometimes?”

–ROBERT A., 51, SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR

“I don’t feel like myself; I feel like some other person inside me.”

–VICKI B., 44, MEDICAL TECHNICIAN

“I didn’t let myself feel anything about my divorce until after I was divorced. The emotional side of me just shuts down under stress.”

–FRED D., 42, BOND RATINGS ANALYST

“I’ve been in a shell, and I feel empty inside.”

–LINDA A., 33, TEACHER

“A very powerful wave of emotion comes over me, and I don’t feel in control of myself. I feel that this person is going to do what she wants and I’m over in a corner, helpless, waiting to see what happens.”

–PENELOPE J., 54, FREE-LANCE WRITER

“I act differently with different people.”

–MARSHA G., 36, FASHION CONSULTANT

         Are you surprised to find that you’ve experienced some of these symptoms of dissociation yourself? You shouldn’t be. The fact is that dissociation is a healthy adaptive defense used almost universally by people in response to overwhelming stress or life-threatening danger. What’s more, many normal people experience mild dissociative symptoms on occasion when their lives are not in immediate danger.

Dissociation is not always the worst case scenario you may mistakenly think it is. It runs along a continuum. Most of us experience mild symptoms of it in our everyday life, like Alice, the travel consultant, who loses all track of time when she becomes engrossed in a good book’a mild form of amnesia. Then there are many other people who experience a moderate degree of symptoms but do not necessarily have a dissociative illness unless their symptoms are associated with distress or dysfunction. Of course, “moderates” who’ve adapted to their symptoms and compensated for them –sometimes unhealthily–may not regard them as distressing or realize their damaging effects. Fred, the bond ratings analyst, is a cautionary example. A man who doesn’t let himself feel anything, a manifestation of a dissociative symptom, may adapt by burying himself in his work and not experience distress in an intimate relationship until it has ended.

Severe symptoms are found mainly in people who have a dissociative disorder, but even at its most extreme this illness is not the catastrophic affliction that it’s often made out to be. In the most basic terms dissociative identity disorder, or DID, formerly called multiple personality disorder, is what happens when your “inner child” or some other hidden part of yourself operates independently, seizes control, and makes you act inappropriately or impairs your ability to function. Vicki, the medical technician, who says, “I don’t feel like myself; I feel like some other person inside me,” is describing a severe dissociative symptom because in her case that internal “other person” is a separate personality state. If that’s true for you, like Vicki, you can have DID and still complete your college education, hold down a responsible job, get married, be a good parent, and have a circle of close friends. And best of all, you can recover.

         Dissociative symptoms and disorders are far more prevalent in the general population than previously recognized for a good reason: a great many people don’t report their symptoms to therapists because they can’t identify them! Research has shown that these symptoms are as common as those of depression and anxiety, but the person who is unfamiliar with them may not regard them as significant.?

Dissociation is not always the worst case scenario you may mistakenly think it is. It runs along a continuum. Most of us experience mild symptoms of it in our everyday life, like Alice, the travel consultant, who loses all track of time when she becomes engrossed in a good book’a mild form of amnesia. Then there are many other people who experience a moderate degree of symptoms but do not necessarily have a dissociative illness unless their symptoms are associated with distress or dysfunction. Of course, “moderates” who’ve adapted to their symptoms and compensated for them –sometimes unhealthily–may not regard them as distressing or realize their damaging effects. Fred, the bond ratings analyst, is a cautionary example. A man who doesn’t let himself feel anything, a manifestation of a dissociative symptom, may adapt by burying himself in his work and not experience distress in an intimate relationship until it has ended.

Related articles

• #8 Dissociative Identity Disorder (itsdrpsycho.wordpress.com)
• Schizophrenia and Dissociative Identity Disorder… (michaelswingman.wordpress.com)
• what is dissociation? (forfreepsychology.wordpress.com)
• People with dissociative disorder:….time is distorted? (ptsdawayout.com)

Depression: How to feel happy again

The following post is from the wonderful Jessica Morris, who herself has been depressed and fought the heavy war against it. She has written a precise, informative and helpful text on her own thoughts regarding the King of suffering, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

More inspiration can be found at her page: http://jessicamorris.net

Related articles

• weight of depression (maycauseirritation.wordpress.com)
• How You Can Better Manage Your Chronic Depression (uptownzrpastorek.wordpress.com)
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• 

The Night I Gave Up My Life

The Night I Gave Up On Life

By Steven Aitchison 272 Comments

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I don’t quite know why I am sharing this extremely personal story with you now, except that there is a little voice pushing me to let it out, and I am acting on that.

This story might be upsetting for some and it might make others feel angry and for that I apologise.

I want to tell you about the night I gave up on life.

It was back in 1990, my life looked as if it was going well, I had a lot of friends, I had a decent job, I had travelled a bit, I had good looks, I had money in my pocket, the works.  The thing is I wasn’t all that happy and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I was unhappy inside.  I used to fantasize about ending my life, it was actually a real comfort to know that I had the choice of living or dying.

I used to plan how I was going to end my life so as it would look like an accident to lessen the pain on my family, my favourite fantasy was jumping off a tall building.

One night, I was working in a bar and I was walking the 2 mile walk home late at about 1am.  The rain could be heard thundering down onto the pavements.  I was walking slowly in the rain as I liked the feel of rain against my skin.  I noticed in the distance a dog, and it was limping quite heavily.  When the dog got closer, I noticed the dog had only 3 legs as it ran past me.  For no reason, I started crying uncontrollably as I felt so sorry for this dog.  I couldn’t get the dog out of my mind the next day, and wondered why I was so upset by it.  I realised I felt like the dog: alone, soaked, not fully functional and nowhere to go.

A few nights later I decided that the jacket of life no longer fitted me and I was taking the jacket off for good.  I said goodnight to my mum and dad, I called my sisters earlier on to tell them I loved them.  I took 26 strong sleeping tablets up to my bedroom after telling my dad not to wake me up in the morning for work as I had a days holiday.  I sat in bed with the tablets, a glass of milk and cried as I took each tablet.  I cried for my mum, and at how heartbroken she would be, I cried for my dad as I had only told him I loved him once in my life.  I cried for my sisters as I would miss them terribly and knew they would miss me.  I took all 26 tablets and put my head on my pillow to die.  I am crying as I write this just now.

I can’t quite remember when I woke up, I was in hospital and two of my friends were there with my mum and dad and sisters.  I had been unconscious, I honestly don’t know how long as I have never spoken of this to my family since.  The morning after I had taken the tablets my dad was up for work as normal.  He didn’t wake me up as I had told him not to, however he heard a bang when he got up at around 5am.  Apparently I had fallen out of bed.  That fall , and my dad hearing it, saved my life, I believe.

When I woke up in the hospital there was a lot of crying, a lot of questions and a lot of explaining.  The hospital psychiatrist came round and asked if I needed help.  I told her I knew why I had done it and I was going to rectify the issues in my life.  I felt ashamed, guilty, upset and angry at myself at having to put my family through something as awful as this just because I didn’t have the balls to sort out some of my problems.

I didn’t feel I fitted into life, with the friends I had, the job, just everything.  What did I do? I started over.  I dropped my friends as I realised they were drinking buddies and not friends, I changed my job, I upgraded my skills, I got my finances sorted out and moved to another city.  I have never looked back since and I have been on a quest ever since to find myself and share the knowledge I have with others.

Lessons From That Night

Nothing and I mean nothing is so bad that you have to take your own life.  There are always options and if the worst comes to the worst, drop everything and start again.  If you are in this situation just now, please believe me when  I say it will get better and there are people who can help.

I’ve learned to tell others how much I love them and how much I appreciate them.

I’ve learned to look for the signs that others might need help.

I mentioned earlier the jacket did not fit, what I realised when I awoke in the hospital was that the jacket can be altered to fit me and I didn’t have to fit the jacket.

I have learned so much more over the years since that night and my long standing depression was lifted in one decision – I will change my life to suit me.

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Filed Under: Psychology Tagged With: end life, giving up, losing hope, suicide

About Steven Aitchison
I am the creator of Change Your Thoughts (CYT) blog and love writing and speaking about personal development, it truly is my passion. There are over 500 articles on this site from myself and some great guest posters.
If you want to learn more about my products you can check out Steven Aitchison’s Productsor check out my books and Kindle books on Amazon

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