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As we heard from our guest Kellie Holly last week, verbal and emotional abuse is insidious and destructive. Once you recognize you're in an abusive relationship, what do you do about it? Shelly and Dr. Michael Marshall say putting a stop to verbal and emotional abuse is up to you.
I knew the time would come when I would be hit with the old "I want to live with my dad!" routine. Every divorced or separated parent hears it, regardless of whether or not mental illness takes a seat at their dinner table. But knowing it's coming does little to soften the inevitable blow.
January 22, 2010, I left my husband. When I returned the next day after a judge granted me an ex-parte order, the law arrested him and removed him from the house. They handcuffed him in front of our teenage boys. I was left with two grief-stricken and angry boys who didn’t understand what happened.
None of us understood what was happening. None of us could have foretold the future we’re living today.
There are times I am strong and focused on recovery from anorexia nervosa. There are other times I feel hopeless. It is at those times I see my life as a dark and endless tunnel. I can only see anorexia in my future, and it looks like a bleak future without hope nor life.
I felt that way last week and I could not bring myself to write one word no matter how hard I tried. I was sick at heart, and my strength was totally depleted. However, after much prayer and talk with some wonderful friends, I found myself reclaiming my strength and new hope is growing within me.
Dealing with trauma anniversaries, triggers and the general anxiety that goes along with them is one of the toughest parts of having an anxiety disorder. So today I've got some tips to help you cope with anxiety cues, and heal post traumatic stress.
If you have dissociative identity disorder, dissociation is your primary coping mechanism. As such, it's both adaptive and maladaptive. It allows you to continue functioning despite overwhelming stress. But dissociation is also what prevents you from recognizing that you've fallen off a cliff until you hit the ground. The idea behind taking stock of mental health warning signs is to notice your free fall a little sooner. Ideally, you'd eventually have the awareness to see the edge of the cliff from a distance and avoid it altogether.
The better you listen, the more you will know. It may sound very simple and it is. Listening takes up more of your waking hours than any other activity. Of your waking hours, 70% of them are spent communicating. Writing takes up 9%, reading 16%, talking is 30% and listening is 45% of communicating hours. THE underrated business tool is good listening.
This week one of my Twitter followers asked me for advice on communicating with her friends and family about her mental illness. She has only recently started telling people of her illness and she wasn’t sure on how to express her needs around her mental illness.
This is a great question and one I think every person with a mental illness faces. How do you tell people about your mental illness needs?
Verbal abuse is confusing. I sometimes blame myself for not hearing our conversations for what they were. Conversations is not the right word. A conversation is a flow of words and thoughts, back and forth, between two people - a dialogue. But my ex-husband and I didn't have dialogues, we filled our communications with monologues in which we looked at one another, directed our sometimes screaming voices at one another, but definitely did not converse.
One of the things I have tried hardest to avoid is having a house divided. Regardless of the differences in our DNA, I wanted our family to function as one cohesive unit. But lately, despite my best efforts, one of the sheep is doing his best to separate himself from the flock. And it's driving me nuts.
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...