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Eight Tips For Battling Depression

by | Aug 31, 2018 | Anger, Anxiety, Baby Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Coping With Depression, Faith, Fear, Forgiveness, Grief, Guilt, Help For Grief And Grieving, Hope, Loneliness, Loss, Love, Major Depressive Disorder, Mental Illness Stigma, Mood Disorder, Sadness, Self Loathing, Shame, Stress, Trauma | 3 comments

We’ve all seen the commercials:

“Depression hurts.”

“Do you have trouble concentrating or making decisions? ___ [drug] can help.”

“Depression can make you feel like you have to wind yourself up to get through the day.”

“Depression can take so much out of you.”

I have to say that all of that is true. I hate to use the word depression (I think most people do), but things have been rough since my daughter died. I’ve scraped for words to express the isolation, pain, persistent sadness, discouragement, lethargy, roller coaster days, rage, sullenness, futility… but every time those words fall short.

Over the last few years, I’ve learned  a lot of things not to do, and a few things to try.

Most important is that a quick fix is a myth. So often I’ve woken up feeling OK, moved through the day’s activities relatively well, actually enjoyed some of the day’s moments, and thought to myself, “Hurray! I’m better!” Only I woke up the next day back in the swamp, feeling worse than before because I was wrong. I hadn’t actually left it behind.

Here are a few ways that have helped me, along with a few things I recommend avoiding.

If you are struggling with depression:

1. If you are a spiritual person, pray and tell God about how you feel and ask for help. Don’t shut God off just because you don’t feel God’s presence anymore. Feelings are fickle things, affected by lack of sleep, poor eating habits, hormones, illness, grief, and more.

I found that praying in the shower was a good place because

1) I could usually count on not being interrupted by my children, and

2) if I cried my heart out, the water washed my tears and snot away (I’m not a pretty cryer.)

2. Talk yourself through the day. I don’t mean talk out loud to yourself – that’s the fast-lane to crazytown. What I mean is this: if you catch yourself possibly over-reacting or taking the actions or words of another person personally, try to stop long enough to remind yourself that you are predisposed to assume the worst right now. Tell yourself, “I need to take my own emotional/mental/physical state into account when I’m reading other people and cut everyone, including this jerkwad, some slack.”

When I remind myself of this, I’m more likely to step back and wait to see if what I am jumping to conclusions and being paranoid (and usually I am). This helps preserve those relationships, and heaven knows we need as many healthy relationships as we can get.

3. Talk to someone about your struggle. Be selective. Keep your circle small, at least at first. Look for someone who is strong because they have struggled through some hard things themselves (not because he or she is a know-it-all). Find someone you can trust. Don’t talk to that girl who starts every story with, “Don’t tell anyone else, but so-and-so told me …” If they tell stories about other people, don’t give them any dirt on you. The right person will listen well, try to understand you, and give realistic counsel. They will be flexible but also persistent, drawing you out even when you withdraw or hide what’s inside.

4. Remain engaged with your family and friends. Make yourself go to birthday parties, cook-outs, ball games… whatever it is that you and your friends and family do together. Go even when every cell in your body wants to hole up in bed. We need people, and you have never experienced encouragement quite like spending time with people who care about you and who love to have fun.

I am so thankful for my husband and friends who have dragged me out of the house. No matter how many times it happens, I’m always surprised at how much better I feel when I go, even when it’s The Last Thing I want to do that day.

5. Give yourself time. This one has been hard for me. I want to be done with this depression. I want to move on, move forward, leave it behind, get better. I’m tired of dragging it around every day. But my counsellor keeps reminding me that there is no timetable on grieving. And if I try to stuff it all away and hide it, that actually makes the whole process longer. I need to feel those feelings and work through my grief, not run away from it.

6. Go see your doctor. Ask him or her to check for any physical problems and talk about how you are doing. It is very common for an illness or untreated condition to affect every part of you, including your energy level and outlook on life in general. They will collect some labs to look for things like low iron, an out-of-whack thyroid, or abnormally high white cell count (indicates that your body is fighting an infection somewhere). The doctor should be able to work with you to identify ways for you to improve your physical health, and present some options for improving your emotional and mental health.

7. Do your homework before trying supplements and/or prescription medications. Talk with your doctor about this. They will help you select the best things to try and often have non-prescription options as well. Taking a pill, whether it is an antidepressant or an herbal remedy, is not going to make you happy. These treatments are designed to give enough of a boost to do the hard work of recovery.

Be sure to ask your doctor and pharmacy about how various things interact. Tell them everything you are taking, including herbals and home remedies, because some things are very dangerous when combined. And if you think you need to change something because it isn’t working, don’t just stop cold-turkey! Call your doctor or pharmacist to see if you need to wean yourself off or if it is safe to just stop.

The best advice I was given about trying meds? Try one thing at a time, and give it at least a month before changing anything. Otherwise you won’t know what helped and what didn’t.

8. Build in some cushion. During the worst of my depression, I realized that my weeks were so tightly-scheduled that I had no slack at all for bad days. You know the kind: it’s all you can do to get the kids fed, dressed, and to school, and when you finish that, you collapse. Forget work, laundry, paying bills, washing dishes, cleaning house, grocery shopping. I got radical, backing out of commitments, canceling activities, and taking a leave of absence from work to build in some slack. It gave me the time I needed to rest and recover.

I hope these tips are helpful. I offer them up as ideas picked up along my own struggle in hopes that they encourage you to keep going, keep trying, and most importantly, get help.

Fighting The War: Addiction

by | Aug 31, 2018 | Addiction, Child Neglect, Child Protective Services, Compassion, Fear, Guilt, Hope, Poverty, Economic Struggles and Hardship, Sadness, Substance Abuse, Uncategorized | 2 comments

Mary sat there with her eyes rolling back into her head; her mouth foaming a bit. Her newborn baby was sleeping in her arms while she jostled him each time she would nod out and try to keep focused.

She looks up at me and says, “you just want to take my baby away from me. All of you Social Workers are the same.”

I stare blankly. I am new at this, but I can’t let Mary know that. I am just 25 years old, and she is well into her 40′s. She is not new at this, not by along shot.

Little does she know it isn’t her newborn I am after, it is her disease.

“Do you have any other kids Mary?” I ask, as I fill out her assessment.

“Yeah. 4. They all were taken away from me because people like you don’t think I care about my kids. People like you think I have no heart, and all I care about is drugs.”

I clarify for her that people like me what to see her clean, healthy, and safe.

After an hour long assessment I learned Mary has been using for more than ten years. She doesn’t even remember how old she was when she started, but she does remember the first time she sold her body for a hit of heroin. She tried rehab too many times to count, and currently she is high on the doctor-prescribed methadone mixed with a hit of heroin.

The air is thick with concerns, and I am forced to send her back out on the street with her newborn wondering if she has a warm place to stay tonight. I asked her and she laughed at me and said, “yes where else would I bring this baby?”

She still thinks I want her baby. She doesn’t know I want her disease.

I want Mary to claim war on it. I want her to fight with me. I want her to have the ability to see herself as more then just a drug addict. I want her to see herself not as a prostituting drug whore, but as a loving Mom.

It is clear she is an addict, but it is also clear to me she is a loving Mom as well (the baby is swaddled in a blanket, fed, and she is cooing at him. She bathes him in kisses, and opens her diaper bag for a pacifier). That baby deserves his Mother to fight the war. That baby deserves a better life then getting passed around the drug world, because if he stays he will never get out.

I really don’t want to take her baby.

After a few more meetings and evaluations, Mary refuses my advice to go into family residential treatment. It is the only way for her to keep her newborn son, and for them both to be safe. She isn’t ready for the fight. Her disease is telling her that it is more important then her kids. Her disease is running Mary.

Mary isn’t fighting because she hasn’t “hit bottom” or reclaimed the right to her body, her life, her choices.

By now I am sure you know the outcome, Mary lost her baby to the state. Her 5th child to the system. I was just another Social Worker that had to report it. I was, what she said I was, a baby snatcher. I wish I could explain why, but nothing I said comforted her. She refused treatment, and I, ethically, could not let her continue to take care of her 1 month old on the streets she sells herself and buys drugs on.

You may be reading this and thinking “I’ll never get this low,” “This isn’t me” “my story is different” or “it hasn’t consumed me” “I have control of it”.

Don’t fool yourself, Mary thought all of these things as well.

Addiction is all the same disease.

It will consume you if you don’t choose to consume it. It will make you give it everything. It can push you to do things you never imagined you be willing to do. It will cost you not only years of your life, but your loved ones. It will take all of who you are, and what makes you “YOU”, and give it a slow and painful death.

It is violent, and abusive, and it needs to stop.

As a professional in the field of Addiction I can tell you this: You can not do it alone. You shouldn’t have to do it alone. If you needed surgery to remove tumor, do you take the scalpel and do it yourself? No. It is the same thing my friend, the VERY same thing.

A disease is a disease is a disease.

We (professionals) aren’t here to take your babies. We aren’t here to pass judgment and tell you how bad you are. We didn’t get a degree in this to make fun of you, or to watch you pee in a cup.

We did it to help you fight. We are here to reclaim you.

I am no longer 25 years old, and I may not be in the business of rehab anymore (instead I am a stay at home, blogging Mom). However, Mary, and all the other people I sat with in various rooms at various locations will always be in my heart.

I will always feel like I am a warrior against Addiction.

I will always want to win the war, support addicts and their families. And I am here to tell you….

you are not alone with that monster.

Don’t let the Addiction win.

Reclaim yourself, your life, and what you rightly deserve.

Seek help, and fight the war.

Perfection

by | Aug 30, 2018 | Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Cancer and Neoplasia, Coping With Cancer, Eating Disorder NOS, Eating Disorders, Perfectionism, Restrictive Eating Disorders | 1 comment

Perfection isn’t always attainable and the cost may be too high.

Talk to your loved ones:

My sister P has an unrelenting drive to pursue perfection.

In the 70′s, she started working as a file clerk.  She worked and worked, harder and harder until she was Vice President of one of the biggest banks in the world. All without a college education.   remember as a child, she’d get up at a ridiculous time every morning to iron her clothes so she was perfect for her day.  On the weekends, she would wash and detail her car so it was perfect, too.  She was meticulous about everything she was involved with.

When someone gave her a gift she liked or someone did something well she exclaimed in a high pitch voice, “PERFECT!!!”  I gave up on her level of perfect a long time ago, knowing I was never as driven as either of my sisters to keep up appearances.

She was nicknamed, after Olive Oyl, the character in the Popeye cartoons who was tall and slim with dark hair just like hers. My sister and I always struggled with our weight as children and adults but not P.  She vowed as a junior high school student she would never be fat and she never was.

When P discovered she had cancer she fought extremely hard. When she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma 20 years ago, the survival rate was much lower. Her treatments were hard but she kept her spirits up.  After her bone marrow transplant she got out of the hospital faster than anyone else had before.

Year after year passed and P remained cancer-free against all odds.

Yesterday, my sister K and I drove 3.5 hours each way to see P.  It was a tough visit. She’s not breathing on her own, has 5 tubes down her throat, has had a heart attack, and her kidneys are working at 25%.  She is being kept alive on machines because of an infection anyone normally could get at home.  Part of this is because she had a bone marrow transplant and will forever have a compromised immune system.

After talking to P’s doctors we also discovered she partially did this to herself.

P didn’t eat enough and when she did eat she didn’t eat healthy foods.  I can remember for years now if she ate a normal meal she would be in the bathroom with diarrhea or throwing up.

We found out yesterday along with all the medical issues P is facing she is suffering from long-term malnutrition.

This is a woman who has money.  She can afford to eat but she chose not to. We know now she didn’t eat enough for a long time.  In her search for her version of perfection she is fighting for her life and on life support with an infection that you or I would be in bed with mildly inconvenienced .

She always had Cosmo or Glamor magazines in her home and strove never to be bigger than a size 6.  She was forever losing just 8 more pounds.

I hope all the women I know read this and take it to heart.

P will always suffer the effects of her long-term malnutrition.  It is not too late for your daughters, it is not too late for anyone reading this who struggles as P does with food.  It sickens me that my sister who I love so dearly is malnourished.

Talk to your daughters.  Talk to your friends.  Before you skip that meal to fit into that new dress think of P and eat something healthy.  Trying to be  some unreal version of a woman can kill you.

I have no words for the anger I feel about this.  I have always hated the unreal images of women and the shapes I will never be, but this event takes my anger to a whole new level. If women as a whole don’t buy into the magazine image of a woman then the image of the size 0 woman as perfection will have to change.

Let that start here.

Ballet

by | Aug 30, 2018 | Anger, Anorexia Nervosa, Anxiety, Bullying, Coping With Bullying, Eating Disorders, Emotional Abuse, How To Heal From Being Bullied, Restrictive Eating Disorders, Stress | 4 comments

I began dancing when I was 4 years old.

My great-aunt owned our dance studio, so for the girls in my family, dance was non-negotiable.

The first few years of ballet we just had to go for one hour a week, and let’s be honest, you don’t do a whole lot of ballet when you’re 4 and 5 years old. It’s like cat herding. The fact that they were able to keep us all in the same room at the same time was a pretty impressive accomplishment.

My older sister started 3 years before me, so for the first few years, I always went to her class too. I watched her dance with her peers and with one of our cousins, I watched their feet, their new tricks. I would imagine how in 3 years I would look just like her. I would be graceful, balanced, thin and my great-aunt would shower me with the same praise she did my sister and cousin.

But as time passed, I didn’t turn into my sister.

While she grew boobs and a tiny waist, I grew out. I didn’t get the good body or the great balance. I was the chubby girl who couldn’t hold her releve without tipping a little. I was the chubby girl that gave 100%, but always came up short.

My great-aunt began to notice that I was chubby and made it a point to remind me of it regularly. When it was nearly time to start ballet on pointe, she told me that I either needed to lose 10 pounds, or wait a year. I was 10.

I had to wait a year.

I picked up extra ballet classes in hopes of improving my technique, of winning the favor of my great-aunt. The extra classes turned into extra opportunities for her to criticize me. To criticize my size, to remind me that I was not graceful like my sister or my cousin, both of which carried on the family tradition of becoming dance instructors for the younger kids.

Each week I prepared myself, I put on my invisible armor which was dented from the last class’s slightly veiled insults. “Oh Katie, well, I guess that’s better than last time.” Or “Katie, you know that you would be able to do that even easier with less weight.” Sometimes she said it only to me, sometimes she stopped the music and hurled the words at me in front of all the other girls in my class.

I tried to quit, but my mom, who was so well intentioned, told me to keep trying. I kept trying, and to my credit, I did improve. For 14 years I went to ballet, the last few years spending over 8 hours a week in that studio, being told I was not graceful, being denied solos, becoming the first person in my family to not be offered a job to teach there.

At the end of my 14th year, I went away to college.

When I went to watch the dance recital the the next summer I was 60 pounds lighter, I hadn’t had a period in 10 months and I was dangerously underweight. I was out of control.

I was starving myself.

I was anorexic.

I can’t give ballet all the credit for the anorexia, because truthfully it was initiated by a need to control something in my life because I was spiraling into depression I couldn’t climb out of. So I counted calories, and by counted, I mean obsessed over them, I controlled them. I started running. I exercised twice a day.

And the weight fell off.

But when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see a thin girl. I saw the chubby 10 year old who wasn’t allowed to start pointe with her peers. I saw the ungraceful girl who couldn’t keep up, who wasn’t good enough.

It has been 9 years since I quit ballet and 9 years since my first bout with an eating disorder. I say first because eating disorders aren’t like the flu, they don’t just go away. They sit under the surface waiting to re-emerge, to re-devastate your self-confidence.

I am older now, stronger maybe, but I still see a chubby girl in the mirror. When I gain 5 pounds, I can’t see anything besides failure. When my weight goes above 135 pounds, I literally cannot stop the thoughts of starving myself, of going to any length to be thinner.

To be the graceful ballerina that I always imagined I’d grow up to be.

To be what I couldn’t be all those years ago.

Enabling A Narcissist

by | Aug 29, 2018 | Abandonment, Abuse, Adult Children of Mentally Ill Parents, Adult Children of Narcissistic Parents, Anger, Anxiety, Bullying, Child Abuse, Codpendence, Emotional Boundaries, Enabling, Estrangement, Fear, Guilt, How To Help With Low Self-Esteem, Psychological Manipulation, Psychological Manipulation, Self-Esteem | 4 comments

Adult Children of Narcissists have a tough go of it.

This is her story:

The following was a response I wrote on a message board about the topic of enabling, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ it happens, and how Narcissists and abusers get others to do their bidding. This was written from my personal experiences, growing up with a Narcissistic Mother and watching this scenario play out many times over.

Narcissists thrive on confrontation.  They bully their way by having a tantrum anytime they don’t get what they want.  They turn up the heat enough to obtain it.  The heat rises until they get it.  In short, they learn our boiling points, find our buttons, and study our weaknesses.  They keep hammering away until they get what they want.

It’s pure ruthless persistence on a target they’ve studied for years, but they also come across tactics that generally work.  When they don’t get what they’re after they commonly rage to scare you into giving in, or attempt guilt or sympathy ploys.  Their purpose never wavers,  and they will stop at nothing to achieve their goal.

Simply, a Narcissist or abuser will keep hammering and chiseling down until their targets are just plain WEAK.  They do that by isolating the target from healthy relationships with anyone outside their control.  And I mean close relationships, people that you’d bear your heart and soul to. People that would be out for YOUR good, that you’ve built a long-time trusted relationship with.

ACONs (Adult Children of Narcissists) often say they were forbidden from having friends, bringing friends to the house, and tightly controlled telephone usage.  It is designed to create enough distance between you and others so such a relationship can never form.

Abusers detest anyone who may have more influence over you than they do.

If such a relationship already exists in your life, abusers will seek to drive a wedge between you and that person.  Divide and conquer. The abuser creates enough stress on the relationships to create doubt in the other party.  They swoop  in to become the new ‘reality’ by inserting their perceptions on the weakened target.

My father is an enabler because he’s been trained by my mother to be. She hammers him by exploiting and over-blowing any little offense she can muster (creating conflict) to show how right she is, how awful she has it, etc. She hammers at him until he relents. She does the same thing to my siblings, through personal confrontation and phone calls. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I remember as a kid, we all knew it was just easier to give my mother what she wanted than deal with her rages.  If an abuser does that enough, they are training us to just give them whatever they want, because we know what’s in store if we don’t.  It’s cost/benefit analysis, isn’t it?

Welcome to the hammering machine. I knew that other people would take bad news better than my mother.  So if I got caught in the middle of something between her and someone outside the family unit, she always won because even though I may lose greatly on something involving that person, it was easier than dealing with my mother’s rages.

There’s the birth of an enabler.

There comes a point where you just can’t deal with fighting them anymore, especially when you live under their roof.  Even though we move out, that brainwashing has been reinforced for years, and continues into adulthood. Give your abuser what they want, or there’s hell to pay.

And even though we’ve moved out, Ns make sure they insert themselves in everything, don’t they?  They appear to be interested in us, invade personal space, demand personal information, run amock over boundaries. The Narcissist is making it known that they have a right to everything about us, and will not stand for anything less than EVERYTHING. It’s so they can continue to insert their perception of reality into their target’s lives and retain control.

They continue forcing themselves onto the target, through phone calls or unannounced visits. If you’re never allowed to (or given the space to) think for yourself, how can you?  Narcissists hinder this process as much as possible. It’s why they set themselves up as ‘always right’. If you control all the cards and all the information, it’s easier to manipulate things to your benefit. Thus how they move into the second stage of life.

It’s also important to note that everyone has a breaking point. Some much faster than others, due to the nature of the relationship (such as family friends, distant relatives). Others thrive on gossip and drama…but Narcissists know how to spot their targets and say the right things to obtain what they want.

In short, enablers are Narcissists’ servants. It’s like an abusive dog-owner. The abuser controls the entire environment. Some dogs will cower, some will fight back towards the owner. Dogs that fight back will be beaten more severely until they cower, are neglected, or are gotten rid of. But either way most will still protect the territory. They distrust everyone because of what history has taught them.