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Emotional resilience is very important to a person's wellbeing. It is a way to describe how well you mentally bounce back from upsetting situations and events. Resilience can be crucial in mental illness recovery where stress can aggravate symptoms. Being able to better handle stress improves stability.
Disclosure is an important part of living with any mental illness, anxiety included. For those unaware, disclosure simply means letting the people in your life know that you are mentally ill. In a future post, I will share some more practical advice for when you disclose, but right now, I want to focus specifically on why I feel disclosing is so important, and why I feel everyone with mental illness should disclose.
The bullet journal is one of the best planners for people living with a mental illness, and I'll tell you why. Organization can be an incredibly important part of mental health recovery, and one of the best organizational systems for those of us with mental illness is the bullet journal. Basically, a bullet journal is a planner you create yourself using a blank notebook. This system allows for all kinds of organizational techniques, from the most colorful creativity to the most bare-bones minimalism.
When I explain my posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) startle response to people who don't have much knowledge about the disorder, I like to describe my brain as being "stuck in survival mode." It's the easiest way to describe how I feel to people who don't have PTSD because everyone understands what "survival mode" means.
The symptoms of my sexual assault affect my relationships by cropping up in unexpected ways, years after the traumatic event. As I slowly came to terms with what happened to me, these symptoms began to interfere with my romantic relationships in a variety of ways, both subtle and overt. I tried to navigate these symptoms of sexual assault and the further I strived to avoid them, the further they popped up unexpectedly and uninvited. Over the years, I have discovered that there are several things that my partner and I can do to help ease my mind and work towards understanding the aftermath of my assault.
I recently read a book on being more effective in which the author discusses the utility of daily visualization. Daily visualization might make us think of guided visualizations or meditation, but this particular method is distinct from that.
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend about her relative who has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She was worried for her relative because he told her that part of his OCD involved worrying that he was gay. Until then, she'd never heard that rumination about your own sexuality could be an OCD symptom and felt like her relative was probably just part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community.
It's important to know how to reduce anxiety fast because sometimes it feels like your anxiety builds up too quickly to do anything about it. Like you were feeling ok one minute and then suddenly felt extremely anxious? This is a common experience, and it often starts with something going just a little bit different than we might like.
There are many ways to show that you love someone who is struggling with a mental health condition, and giving a gift is one very important method. Read this article to learn about the importance of gift-giving and how to find one for someone who is struggling.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) makes it easy to continually beat yourself up when you have challenging moments and struggles. This just leads to getting stuck in a trap of self-defeat that falsely makes you believe there is no hope for overcoming PTSD. One of the essential things needed for you not to find yourself stuck, however, is self-acceptance.
Where do we go from here? Most of the family thinks just to let her hit bottom and then if she reaches out to help any we can. Some want to just keep paying her bills and just let her sit in the house with no responsibilities. Never been on medication and impossible to get to her when she refuses to talk to ANYONE.
Help.
On the day we agreed to videochat to make things less awkward IRL she woke up with a migraine so we rescheduled to the day after, I made sure to assure her that it was okay and to take her time. Later that day, in the late evening we had a nice chat but suddenly she stopped replying, even though nothing had happened. The day after I texted her good morning and said I hope she was feeling a little better. she wouldn't open my texts.
A couple days after I sent her a longer text saying that even though I had only known her for a short time I care a lot for her and would like to know how she are doing, telling her I'm there for her, assuring her I'm not going anywhere even though things might not be very easy. She wouldn't open it.
A week later I sent a text saying not to feel bad about not answering and that I will be there when she is able to answer again. It's been two weeks since this and she still hasn't opened my texts. She hasn't been active at all.
I don't know what else I can do. I assumed she might have fallen into a depression. I have tried to just not think about it anymore, and I haven't that much but when I do it sort of kills me inside...