Sub Title
Sunday, December 28, 2014
"For some reason, we think the Atonement of Christ applies only at the end of mortal life to redemption from the Fall, from spiritual death. It is much more than that. It is an ever-present power to call upon in everyday life. When we are racked or harrowed up or tormented by guilt or burdened with grief, He can heal us. While we do not fully understand how the Atonement of Christ was made, we can experience ‘the peace of God, which passeth all understanding’” (“The Touch of the Master’s Hand,”Liahona, July 2001, 26; Ensign, May 2001, 23).
Saturday, December 27, 2014
ROCKS
"The Lord came to a man and asked him to push against a big rock. Being obedient, he put on his clothes went out and started pushing. He pushed and pushed, but the rock was not moving. After many days, Satan came and suggested he stop. He had been working and sweating long enough, and the rock was not moving. The man agreed and sat down; that rock was simply too big to move. The Lord came by and asked him why he was sitting. The man explained that he tried as hard as he could, but the rock just would not move to which the Lord said, “I did not ask you to move the rock, I asked you to push against the rock. Look, you have lost some of that extra weight, your muscles are getting stronger, and you are out here in the fresh air and are healthier. Push against the rock, and when it is time to move the rock, I will come and help you.” He will help us with our big heavy rocks in His time, but you know what happens once that rock is moved? We have learned, we have progressed, and we get to push against an even bigger rock." -Lloyd Baird BYU Hawaii devotional Feb 2014
I may have already shared this with you --but this quote makes me think of the period of my life right before my mission and in the MTC. As I was preparing for a mission, I started really making an effort to change things in my life and grow spiritually. I was overcoming bad habits and replacing them with better ones and I thought I was in a pretty good place when I entered the MTC. I remember vividly sitting listening to general conference in the MTC and hearing the spirit speak to my heart that there were still things I needed to improve on. For some reason it just felt too overwhelming. Somehow I had envisioned that I would get to a certain place and then I could rest. Of course in my head I knew life was about progression and that as I improved and grew spiritually--the lord would open up new avenues for me to grow in. But I was not sure I was up for more work.
Healing, like life , is a process. There are times of growth and then there are times of rest. But there are always new opportunities to push against even bigger rocks when we are ready. But you will be strong enough --because you have pushed against the smaller ones. Now I don't share this to say at all that God is the cause of our trials or that he wants us to suffer. But that as the trials of life do come -he helps us gain the strength we need to overcome them. Sometimes that seems "trite". We hear often that the Lord doesn't ever give us something we cannot handle and yet I can attest that there are definitely times that I did not feel up to the tasks put before me. I don't have all the answers-but I do know that we are not alone. No matter how alone we may feel. I know that the Lord is aware of us and I know that he loves us!!
I may have already shared this with you --but this quote makes me think of the period of my life right before my mission and in the MTC. As I was preparing for a mission, I started really making an effort to change things in my life and grow spiritually. I was overcoming bad habits and replacing them with better ones and I thought I was in a pretty good place when I entered the MTC. I remember vividly sitting listening to general conference in the MTC and hearing the spirit speak to my heart that there were still things I needed to improve on. For some reason it just felt too overwhelming. Somehow I had envisioned that I would get to a certain place and then I could rest. Of course in my head I knew life was about progression and that as I improved and grew spiritually--the lord would open up new avenues for me to grow in. But I was not sure I was up for more work.
Healing, like life , is a process. There are times of growth and then there are times of rest. But there are always new opportunities to push against even bigger rocks when we are ready. But you will be strong enough --because you have pushed against the smaller ones. Now I don't share this to say at all that God is the cause of our trials or that he wants us to suffer. But that as the trials of life do come -he helps us gain the strength we need to overcome them. Sometimes that seems "trite". We hear often that the Lord doesn't ever give us something we cannot handle and yet I can attest that there are definitely times that I did not feel up to the tasks put before me. I don't have all the answers-but I do know that we are not alone. No matter how alone we may feel. I know that the Lord is aware of us and I know that he loves us!!
Sunday, December 7, 2014
9 Things I wish people understood about anxiety by Kady Morrison
this is taken from: http://www.vox.com/2014/12/4/7262991/anxiety-disorder-help
1) Anxiety does not move in a straight line
For folks who move through life without an anxiety disorder, I imagine fear and panic as emotions that are pretty straight-forward: something happens, or is projected as going to happen, that causes an apprehensive or frightened response. But for a person with an anxiety disorder, things don't work that way. Perhaps this is best illustrated by example. Let's think of something minor — like, say, losing your car keys. That would of course be frustrating for anyone. A person without anxiety might think something along the lines of, "Oh no, what a hassle!," or maybe even, "Oh no, this is going to screw things up for me for a few days!" But for someone with anxiety? Well, that train of thought might look more like this: "Oh no, my car keys are gone! What if I don't find them? What if I try to get them replaced but it's not possible or it takes forever and something happens and I need my car and I can't get in it? What if the thing that happens is that I need to drive someone to the hospital? What if that person is my best friend? What if they're dying and the only way to get them to a hospital is my car and my keys are still gone? Oh, god, I LOST MY CAR KEYS AND NOW MY BEST FRIEND IS GOING TO DIE AND IT'S ALL MY FAULT."
This brings me fairly neatly to my second point:
2) Anxiety is not rational, and boy, do we know it
Like, seriously, I promise you: we know. You really cannot spend all day every day listening to the thoughts of an anxious person and not know that a large portion of those thoughts make approximately no sense at all. Just last week, I found myself worrying that my parents would look at the person I was and decide they hated me, despite knowing to the depths of my soul that is not something that would ever occur. This is one of the most frustrating things about having an anxiety disorder: knowing as you're freaking out that there's no reason to be freaked out, but lacking the ability to shut the emotion down. A therapist of mine once compared it to having a faulty alarm system wired into your brain — rather than going off only when something is really dangerous or scary, the anxious person's mental landscape will fall to chaos over all manner of things, however tiny or inconsequential. In fact, sometimes the thing that causes the reaction is so tiny or inconsequential that even we don't know what it was. Other times, something that has caused a reaction in the past is a total non-event in the present.
3) With anxiety, some days are good days, and some days are bad days
I mean, don't get me wrong — this is true of life in general. But I mention it because it's the thing I most often find myself wishing everyone in my life already knew: some days are good anxiety days, and some days are bad anxiety days, and whether I'm having a good anxiety day or a bad anxiety day is going to affect the way I react to the things and people around me. If, for example, I'm having a bad anxiety day, and somebody in my life gets angry at me? There's a pretty decent chance that I'm going to either a) have a panic attack, b) burst into tears, c) say anything I can think of to make their anger go away, or d) all of the above. Of course, I can't (and don't) expect the people in my life not to get angry at me, or to only get angry at me on specific day; sometimes I do things wrong, and make people angry, and that's normal, and healthy, and okay. But I wish it was also considered normal, and healthy, and okay for me to say, "Hey, I'm having a bad anxiety day, can we do this another time," and trust that the person I'm saying it to knows it's not a cop-out or an excuse so much as a delay — and a request for kindness.
4) Anxiety is physically painful
Of course it's emotionally painful, too — in fact, I'd argue that the emotional pain is the worst of it — but most people know that part, and not this one. So: surprise! Anxiety hurts. Panic attacks are the pinnacle of the physical pain piece for most of us, since so much of that experience is centered around the sensation that your chest is tightening to the point that you can't breathe. But anxiety can also cause headaches, nausea, heart palpitations, muscle tension, insomnia, dizziness, and exhaustion. There are people who have deeply painful gastrointestinal responses to anxiety (ever heard the phrase "tying your stomach up in knots?"); there are people who, when anxious, hold their muscles so rigidly that they end up pulling or tearing them. It hurts. It doesn't hurt the same way for everyone, but it hurts. And that brings me to:
5) Not all anxiety is created equal
I, personally, have generalized anxiety disorder — or, as I like to think of it when we're at home, "everything everywhere all the time always disorder." But anxiety comes in many different varieties and flavors, and so do people's experiences of it. Some people suffer from generalized anxiety; some people deal with social anxiety; some people have specific phobias. Some people come by anxiety genetically; some people develop anxiety as the result of a specific event; some people have anxiety due to their brain chemistry. Some people have been anxious all their lives; some people develop anxiety as a teen or adult; some people eventually overcome anxiety, or at least figure out how to manage it to the point that it's negligible. Some people medicate their anxiety, and some people don't. Some people see a therapist to help them with their anxiety and some people don't.
6) Anxiety and depression are linked
Not all anxious people have depression; not all depressed people have anxiety. But they are known within the mental health community as common companions — and, in fact, one can lead to the other. If, for example, some hypothetical person with an anxiety disorder had the tendency to freeze up when overwhelmed, and had difficulty reaching out to the people in their life when that happened, then that hypothetical person could, hypothetically, remain frozen for long enough that eventually the anxiety (and all their other feelings) could bleed away and leave just the stagnation — in other words, depression. You know, hypothetically. That could occur.
The reason this is on this list isn't because I think people don't know about it. I actually think it's fairly common knowledge, or at least it is in the communities I travel in. It's because I want you, reader, to understand that we know. We the anxious are typically super aware of the fact that there's a link between anxiety and depression, and — shockingly — it's safe to assume we're pretty anxious about it. For those of us who have experienced a depressive episode in the past, it's even more likely that we're quietly freaking out on a pretty regular basis about the chance of that happening again (which, actually, is a rational fear, as your likelihood of experiencing a depressive episode increases with every time you have one). Probably don't bring it up out of the blue, is what I'm saying here. That, and keep an eye out for it if you can; as freaked out as an anxious person might be about getting depressed, it's really difficult to notice a depressive episode once you're actually inside of it.
7) Unless you've been given explicit permission, when it comes to someone else's anxiety, you should probably listen instead of talk
You know how it's okay when you say something nasty about a member of your family, but if someone else does it, you're going to come down on them like a ton of bricks? This is like that. I can talk about how exhausting or infuriating I find my anxiety, but if you do that, it's probably going to hurt my feelings; I can say that I wish I didn't have anxiety, but if you say that, I'm probably going to think you're an asshole.
Also — and man, do I wish this went without saying — it's never okay to talk to about someone else's mental health issues with a third party, unless you've been given explicit permission to do so, or if your relationship with that third party is one involving legally enforceable confidentiality (your therapist, your lawyer, et cetera). Just because someone has told you something about themselves does not mean they're comfortable with everyone else knowing it. I, obviously, am comfortable with everyone on earth knowing that I'm a nervous wreck, because I would not be writing articles on the internet about it I wasn't. But mental health issues, anxiety included, are still heavily stigmatized in any number of communities, and there are a lot of people who aren't at all okay with people finding out about their struggles. There are even people for whom that's an active anxiety trigger. So, you know. Don't do the thing.
8) As frustrating, infuriating, agonizing, and exhausting as it can be, our experiences and struggles with anxiety are part of us, and we wouldn't be the people we are without them
This is actually something I think people with anxiety, myself included, really struggle to understand. We spend so much time trying to work through our anxiety that it can become almost like another consciousness living within our brain: an enemy that we need to get rid of in order to live full, productive lives. The reality of the situation, as usual, is more complicated than that. Though our anxiety is something that we have to manage, it's also part of who we are. It shapes choices we make, the way we looked at the world, and even facets of our personalities. To look as it as an enemy is to deny that part of ourselves any validity.
About a year ago, my therapist pointed out that I am an anxious person, that I am probably going to be an anxious person for the rest of my life, and that my personality involves certain quirks and tics that are the result of anxiety. It shocked me, even though I'd known for years that I had generalized anxiety disorder — I thought of my anxiety as a disease that needed curing instead of as an (admittedly frustrating) part of who I was. Since then, I've worked hard to stop thinking that way, and it's hugely helped me to dispel the lingering sense of failure and inadequacy that I'd known for years as anxiety's partner in crime. It's okay to be an anxious person, and that's something worth mentioning to the anxious people in your life — they really, honestly, might not know that.
9) And, finally, the most important thing I wish everyone knew about anxiety, and about mental health issues in general: if you know someone with anxiety and you want to help them, ask them what would be helpful, ideally during a time when they are calm and non-panicked
The most unkind thing you can do to a person with anxiety is to pile on, which can be a tricky thing, because it may be something you do without realizing it. The thing about anxiety is that it makes possibility-spinners of all of us — we are, as a group, the sort of people who look at what could happen instead of what is happening, whether we want to or not. And this results in hyper-aware, hypersensitive people more often than it doesn't; it's impossible to torture yourself with thoughts of how others might behave or react to things if you don't know how others generally behave or react to things. Your frustration with us and our spiraling thoughts, your exhaustion at how difficult we can be to deal with, your annoyance at our anxiety-rooted behaviors, your wish that we could just cut it out: we know you are feeling those things. We can tell. And, perhaps more to the point, we are feeling them also — we are also frustrated, exhausted, annoyed at ourselves. We also wish we could just stop. The difference between us and you is that we are thinking those things all the time, because we spend our lives with that anxious personality that can become so grating. There is also a great deal of guilt and self-loathing that comes along with those thoughts for us, both because most of us are struggling daily to feel better and because we really don't want to bother anyone.
It is okay, if you have an anxious person in your life, to find them frustrating or exhausting or annoying. Nobody is blaming you. In fact, believe me: we get it. But you have the ability to walk away when you find yourself responding to someone's anxiety that way, and that gift (and it is a gift) is not one we share. It is better to walk away from an anxious person than it is to feed their frustration with your own. It is better to walk away from an anxious person than it is to tell them they need to calm down — we know we need to calm down, and hearing you say it only adds guilt and failure to the pile of emotions that was already overwhelming us. Distracting us can be helpful, listening to us can be helpful, even sitting with us in silence can be helpful, but please, I beg of you, don't pile on. It makes it so much harder to get to a calmer place, and we really want to do that.
As for what you should do, much though I appreciate your making it to the end of this article, there is no advice that I, A Stranger On The Internet, can give you that will be better than the advice that they, The Person You Actually Know Whose Specific Experience You Are Concerned With, are going to be able to offer. They know themselves, and that makes them a lot more likely to know what they need than I am. You'd be surprised by how many people are afraid to even ask the question. Do not worry, friends. The anxious person in your life? They know they are anxious. Your bringing it up is unlikely to startle them.
In the event that you do ask them and they don't know what they need, then I will say this: everybody needs kindness, especially people who are predisposed to being unkind to themselves. You'd be amazed how much little things — a smile, a reassurance, a compliment, a sandwich — can lift somebody's spirits, and people with anxiety are often afraid or unable to ask for those things, even when (especially when) they need them. So that's my advice: kindness. It's a hard one to go wrong on.
1) Anxiety does not move in a straight line
For folks who move through life without an anxiety disorder, I imagine fear and panic as emotions that are pretty straight-forward: something happens, or is projected as going to happen, that causes an apprehensive or frightened response. But for a person with an anxiety disorder, things don't work that way. Perhaps this is best illustrated by example. Let's think of something minor — like, say, losing your car keys. That would of course be frustrating for anyone. A person without anxiety might think something along the lines of, "Oh no, what a hassle!," or maybe even, "Oh no, this is going to screw things up for me for a few days!" But for someone with anxiety? Well, that train of thought might look more like this: "Oh no, my car keys are gone! What if I don't find them? What if I try to get them replaced but it's not possible or it takes forever and something happens and I need my car and I can't get in it? What if the thing that happens is that I need to drive someone to the hospital? What if that person is my best friend? What if they're dying and the only way to get them to a hospital is my car and my keys are still gone? Oh, god, I LOST MY CAR KEYS AND NOW MY BEST FRIEND IS GOING TO DIE AND IT'S ALL MY FAULT."
This brings me fairly neatly to my second point:
2) Anxiety is not rational, and boy, do we know it
Like, seriously, I promise you: we know. You really cannot spend all day every day listening to the thoughts of an anxious person and not know that a large portion of those thoughts make approximately no sense at all. Just last week, I found myself worrying that my parents would look at the person I was and decide they hated me, despite knowing to the depths of my soul that is not something that would ever occur. This is one of the most frustrating things about having an anxiety disorder: knowing as you're freaking out that there's no reason to be freaked out, but lacking the ability to shut the emotion down. A therapist of mine once compared it to having a faulty alarm system wired into your brain — rather than going off only when something is really dangerous or scary, the anxious person's mental landscape will fall to chaos over all manner of things, however tiny or inconsequential. In fact, sometimes the thing that causes the reaction is so tiny or inconsequential that even we don't know what it was. Other times, something that has caused a reaction in the past is a total non-event in the present.
3) With anxiety, some days are good days, and some days are bad days
I mean, don't get me wrong — this is true of life in general. But I mention it because it's the thing I most often find myself wishing everyone in my life already knew: some days are good anxiety days, and some days are bad anxiety days, and whether I'm having a good anxiety day or a bad anxiety day is going to affect the way I react to the things and people around me. If, for example, I'm having a bad anxiety day, and somebody in my life gets angry at me? There's a pretty decent chance that I'm going to either a) have a panic attack, b) burst into tears, c) say anything I can think of to make their anger go away, or d) all of the above. Of course, I can't (and don't) expect the people in my life not to get angry at me, or to only get angry at me on specific day; sometimes I do things wrong, and make people angry, and that's normal, and healthy, and okay. But I wish it was also considered normal, and healthy, and okay for me to say, "Hey, I'm having a bad anxiety day, can we do this another time," and trust that the person I'm saying it to knows it's not a cop-out or an excuse so much as a delay — and a request for kindness.
4) Anxiety is physically painful
Of course it's emotionally painful, too — in fact, I'd argue that the emotional pain is the worst of it — but most people know that part, and not this one. So: surprise! Anxiety hurts. Panic attacks are the pinnacle of the physical pain piece for most of us, since so much of that experience is centered around the sensation that your chest is tightening to the point that you can't breathe. But anxiety can also cause headaches, nausea, heart palpitations, muscle tension, insomnia, dizziness, and exhaustion. There are people who have deeply painful gastrointestinal responses to anxiety (ever heard the phrase "tying your stomach up in knots?"); there are people who, when anxious, hold their muscles so rigidly that they end up pulling or tearing them. It hurts. It doesn't hurt the same way for everyone, but it hurts. And that brings me to:
5) Not all anxiety is created equal
I, personally, have generalized anxiety disorder — or, as I like to think of it when we're at home, "everything everywhere all the time always disorder." But anxiety comes in many different varieties and flavors, and so do people's experiences of it. Some people suffer from generalized anxiety; some people deal with social anxiety; some people have specific phobias. Some people come by anxiety genetically; some people develop anxiety as the result of a specific event; some people have anxiety due to their brain chemistry. Some people have been anxious all their lives; some people develop anxiety as a teen or adult; some people eventually overcome anxiety, or at least figure out how to manage it to the point that it's negligible. Some people medicate their anxiety, and some people don't. Some people see a therapist to help them with their anxiety and some people don't.
6) Anxiety and depression are linked
Not all anxious people have depression; not all depressed people have anxiety. But they are known within the mental health community as common companions — and, in fact, one can lead to the other. If, for example, some hypothetical person with an anxiety disorder had the tendency to freeze up when overwhelmed, and had difficulty reaching out to the people in their life when that happened, then that hypothetical person could, hypothetically, remain frozen for long enough that eventually the anxiety (and all their other feelings) could bleed away and leave just the stagnation — in other words, depression. You know, hypothetically. That could occur.
The reason this is on this list isn't because I think people don't know about it. I actually think it's fairly common knowledge, or at least it is in the communities I travel in. It's because I want you, reader, to understand that we know. We the anxious are typically super aware of the fact that there's a link between anxiety and depression, and — shockingly — it's safe to assume we're pretty anxious about it. For those of us who have experienced a depressive episode in the past, it's even more likely that we're quietly freaking out on a pretty regular basis about the chance of that happening again (which, actually, is a rational fear, as your likelihood of experiencing a depressive episode increases with every time you have one). Probably don't bring it up out of the blue, is what I'm saying here. That, and keep an eye out for it if you can; as freaked out as an anxious person might be about getting depressed, it's really difficult to notice a depressive episode once you're actually inside of it.
7) Unless you've been given explicit permission, when it comes to someone else's anxiety, you should probably listen instead of talk
You know how it's okay when you say something nasty about a member of your family, but if someone else does it, you're going to come down on them like a ton of bricks? This is like that. I can talk about how exhausting or infuriating I find my anxiety, but if you do that, it's probably going to hurt my feelings; I can say that I wish I didn't have anxiety, but if you say that, I'm probably going to think you're an asshole.
Also — and man, do I wish this went without saying — it's never okay to talk to about someone else's mental health issues with a third party, unless you've been given explicit permission to do so, or if your relationship with that third party is one involving legally enforceable confidentiality (your therapist, your lawyer, et cetera). Just because someone has told you something about themselves does not mean they're comfortable with everyone else knowing it. I, obviously, am comfortable with everyone on earth knowing that I'm a nervous wreck, because I would not be writing articles on the internet about it I wasn't. But mental health issues, anxiety included, are still heavily stigmatized in any number of communities, and there are a lot of people who aren't at all okay with people finding out about their struggles. There are even people for whom that's an active anxiety trigger. So, you know. Don't do the thing.
8) As frustrating, infuriating, agonizing, and exhausting as it can be, our experiences and struggles with anxiety are part of us, and we wouldn't be the people we are without them
This is actually something I think people with anxiety, myself included, really struggle to understand. We spend so much time trying to work through our anxiety that it can become almost like another consciousness living within our brain: an enemy that we need to get rid of in order to live full, productive lives. The reality of the situation, as usual, is more complicated than that. Though our anxiety is something that we have to manage, it's also part of who we are. It shapes choices we make, the way we looked at the world, and even facets of our personalities. To look as it as an enemy is to deny that part of ourselves any validity.
About a year ago, my therapist pointed out that I am an anxious person, that I am probably going to be an anxious person for the rest of my life, and that my personality involves certain quirks and tics that are the result of anxiety. It shocked me, even though I'd known for years that I had generalized anxiety disorder — I thought of my anxiety as a disease that needed curing instead of as an (admittedly frustrating) part of who I was. Since then, I've worked hard to stop thinking that way, and it's hugely helped me to dispel the lingering sense of failure and inadequacy that I'd known for years as anxiety's partner in crime. It's okay to be an anxious person, and that's something worth mentioning to the anxious people in your life — they really, honestly, might not know that.
9) And, finally, the most important thing I wish everyone knew about anxiety, and about mental health issues in general: if you know someone with anxiety and you want to help them, ask them what would be helpful, ideally during a time when they are calm and non-panicked
The most unkind thing you can do to a person with anxiety is to pile on, which can be a tricky thing, because it may be something you do without realizing it. The thing about anxiety is that it makes possibility-spinners of all of us — we are, as a group, the sort of people who look at what could happen instead of what is happening, whether we want to or not. And this results in hyper-aware, hypersensitive people more often than it doesn't; it's impossible to torture yourself with thoughts of how others might behave or react to things if you don't know how others generally behave or react to things. Your frustration with us and our spiraling thoughts, your exhaustion at how difficult we can be to deal with, your annoyance at our anxiety-rooted behaviors, your wish that we could just cut it out: we know you are feeling those things. We can tell. And, perhaps more to the point, we are feeling them also — we are also frustrated, exhausted, annoyed at ourselves. We also wish we could just stop. The difference between us and you is that we are thinking those things all the time, because we spend our lives with that anxious personality that can become so grating. There is also a great deal of guilt and self-loathing that comes along with those thoughts for us, both because most of us are struggling daily to feel better and because we really don't want to bother anyone.
It is okay, if you have an anxious person in your life, to find them frustrating or exhausting or annoying. Nobody is blaming you. In fact, believe me: we get it. But you have the ability to walk away when you find yourself responding to someone's anxiety that way, and that gift (and it is a gift) is not one we share. It is better to walk away from an anxious person than it is to feed their frustration with your own. It is better to walk away from an anxious person than it is to tell them they need to calm down — we know we need to calm down, and hearing you say it only adds guilt and failure to the pile of emotions that was already overwhelming us. Distracting us can be helpful, listening to us can be helpful, even sitting with us in silence can be helpful, but please, I beg of you, don't pile on. It makes it so much harder to get to a calmer place, and we really want to do that.
As for what you should do, much though I appreciate your making it to the end of this article, there is no advice that I, A Stranger On The Internet, can give you that will be better than the advice that they, The Person You Actually Know Whose Specific Experience You Are Concerned With, are going to be able to offer. They know themselves, and that makes them a lot more likely to know what they need than I am. You'd be surprised by how many people are afraid to even ask the question. Do not worry, friends. The anxious person in your life? They know they are anxious. Your bringing it up is unlikely to startle them.
In the event that you do ask them and they don't know what they need, then I will say this: everybody needs kindness, especially people who are predisposed to being unkind to themselves. You'd be amazed how much little things — a smile, a reassurance, a compliment, a sandwich — can lift somebody's spirits, and people with anxiety are often afraid or unable to ask for those things, even when (especially when) they need them. So that's my advice: kindness. It's a hard one to go wrong on.
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Exhausted? There is Hope
I received a letter from a dear friend of mine that has really been struggling emotionally. All I have wanted to do is help her and remind her that THERE IS HOPE! In this letter she mentioned how exhausted she was. Hearing about her exhaustion reminded me of how exhausted I have felt myself with the entire healing process. More and more I see that mental health and healing will be a life long journey for me. At this point in my life I can see some of the great blessings that I've experienced because of the trials I've had but that wasn't always the case.
There were time where I felt taking one more breath was just going to kill me. The pain, confusion, torment, and misunderstanding of loved ones felt like daggers being stabbed in my heart. It took every ounce of energy just to get out of bed in the morning, if I even could. Usually the only thing that got me up was I had to use the bathroom and then would crawl right back in bed. The thought of doing anything not only emotionally felt exhausting but physically as well.The thought of people finding out how much I was struggling was one of the only things that kept me going and made it look like I was actually functioning. However, in reality I was more like a walking zombie full of emotions and depression. It felt like everywhere I went I was carrying concrete bricks weighed down with my emotional problems.
With being so emotionally and physically exhausted I started to question, "Why do I keep going, why am I still here, this is TOOO hard!" My thoughts became suicidal. Having suicidal thoughts seemed to be the only thing that comforted me and took the pain away for a time. I would think, "Once I die people wont be bothered by me any more.", "I am the problem in all of my relationships so if I'm gone things will be better.", "Once I'm dead the pain will be gone."
There is a common belief that once we die our pain will be removed. I do believe that our physical pain is removed however, I also believe our emotional and spiritual pain stays with us. If we have emotional struggles here, we will have them in the next life as well BUT THERE IS HOPE!You may feel like just taking one more breath of air is too hard to do and you are at or even past your breaking point but I promise you that YOU CAN DO IT!
You can not do it alone but you CAN do it and come out victorious!
More and more I'm learning that I can not overcome my struggles on my own. Understanding that has been really hard. Trusting others is something survivors of sexual abuse struggle with because great trust has been completely broken in the past. There have also been times where I turned to someone for help and I came out feeling more hurt.I understand turning to those around you is scary. Start with someone you feel can listen or even preface the conversation with, "I'm really struggling and just need you to listen." If that is too much, which it has been in the past for me, I decided to see a counselor.
My counselor did much more than just listen. She taught me skills that have been life saving. As I've worked hard to learn and apply those skills healing occurred and I felt the effects of the Atonement more in my life.
Now, I know some of you can't afford counseling but there are many other ways to get help from others as well. How can you receive help from others in a way you feel comfortable with? Maybe it's from this blog, e-mailing someone you don't know or lives far away, or calling a help line. Regardless of what you do there is hope for tomorrow. There are self-soothing and coping skills you can learn to help ease the exhaustion and pain. They really work and medication is also an option.
I am no longer struggling just to take my next breath or get up in the morning. Ok, actually that's not true, I will always struggle to get up in the morning but I am happier now. Joy has come back into my life, relationships have deepened, and I no longer feel like I want to die. There is hope. The Atonement is R-E-A-L! There WILL come a time of relief and rest. If you are feeling exhausted please know there is hope!
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