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Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder can be excruciatingly lonely. I endured my loneliest moments with DID in the first few years after diagnosis. Granted, my primary relationship at the time was drawing its dramatic last breaths and I'd recently lost my job. I had virtually no support system and was barely able to feed myself and my child. There's no doubt my loneliness was the result of more than just my Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis. But when I look back through my diaries from that time period, it's clear the diagnosis was partially to blame. In hindsight, it's easy to see why.
As I mentioned in this week's audio, Bob recently suffered a reaction to one of his psychiatric medications. He’s fine now, but the discussions between his father and I that have followed leave me wondering if he’ll survive the fallout.
...and similar ideas with which I struggle.
Sometimes, I struggle. I feel so far away. From everything, especially mental health.
Getting up, getting ready to face the world, wondering just how close the edge is, today. It all takes patience.
When you're dealing with anxiety and depression, when thoughts will barely stay in your head, let alone make sense, when the fog sets in...It takes patience. Inhuman, incalculable patience.
Fighting the good fight sometimes means losing your way
It's with humility and a little embarrassment that I admit to having come to erroneous conclusions about sexual addiction and sex addicts without the data to back me up. Sexual addiction facts should come from educated, experienced experts - not entertainment media and anecdote. We were very fortunate to have Robert Weiss join us last week on the HealthyPlace Mental Health TV Show.
Work plus the holidays, especially Christmas and New Years Eve, put more stress on you and your mind than any other scheduled times of the year. One of the more common stress-related problems is panic attacks.
The holidays are the perfect time to instill a sense of appreciation in your kids for the blessings they have in life. I was out shopping recently for gifts, and ran into some friends who were having a hard time finding a gift for a particularly spoiled niece. This particular young teenage girl they were grumbling about had all the latest gadgets, $200 jeans, and her own horse. Now what on earth could they get her (that wouldn’t break their wallets) that she didn’t already have?
Rapunzel! Rapunzel! What can the woman in your hair teach us about borderline personality disorder (BPD)?
As a villain, Mother Gothel in Disney's Tangled is unique. She's not motivated by revenge, greed, or lust for power. Gothel, terrified of growing older, is motivated by fear. As a result, she begins to display symptoms of BPD--to the point where she will literally die without Rapunzel and her magic hair.
It's no secret that raising children requires patience, particularly children with mental illness. Patience can be the difference between moving forward from conflict and escalating into a full meltdown. I have, however, discovered a quality even more important to raising a child with a psychiatric condition--compassion.
When we were children, for most of us, Christmas was magical. You got to tear into shiny wrapping paper and discover the most amazing and wondrous gifts inside. There was a Santa Claus who confirmed we had been good all year long. There was a Christmas tree reaching to the sky and cookies and candies abounded. Our four-year-old, six-year-old, eight-year-old minds didn’t see the faults, cracks, bills and squabbles. All we remember is the Barbies, remote-control cars and cookies for Santa.
And so it should be. Those memories, even if mostly embellishments of imagination, are great to hold onto.
The problem is, for some reason, we spend our entire adult lives trying to recreate the magic that never existed in the first place.
Prior to my Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis my alters existed and operated outside of my awareness. They affected my life in ways I had no explanation for, like invisible strangers living in your house and rearranging the furniture. Receiving the diagnosis was like someone turned on a light and exposed the multitude around me. Suddenly I could see and hear what had always been there. None of what occurred in the aftermath of that diagnosis was new. But all of it was severely amplified. And I felt, among other things, fear.
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...