Too Far Gone

    There seems to be this idea around dealing with mental illness and mentally ill people that some people are so mentally ill and have been for so long that those people can't be helped. It's this idea that some people are so far lost down the rabbit hole of darkness that mental illness creates that nobody can ever save them. I hear that idea supported more often than you'd think when people say things like, "Well, that person is too far gone. There's no help for them now."

    The people that live with mental illness often think this about themselves, too. We often simultaneously believe that we're "too far gone" to be saved while also praying that what we believe about ourselves isn't true. Believing that you're too far gone into the darkness created by your mental health condition to ever be saved from it is a scary place to be, and it's made even scarier when we hear people saying our fear out loud, even if it's about somebody else they believe can't be helped. 

    The whole idea that I was "too far gone" to be saved was one of the reasons I was afraid to go to therapy. I was afraid the therapist would confirm my worst fear and then send me packing to continue a life of misery that I wouldn't be able to fix or escape unless I did the unthinkable. But...then I went to therapy, and neither of my therapists ever thought that I was beyond help. With the help of my therapist, I was actually able to pull myself up out of the mental illness rabbit hole.

    I wasn't the only one that was able to accomplish this seemingly impossible feat. I saw other people that I cared about pulling themselves out of the rabbit holes of substance abuse and mental illness, too, after they had been described as "too far gone". That reinforced the idea for me that nobody was ever "too far gone" to be pulled back out of the darkness. Many of them had even spent more years than I had being down in that rabbit hole, and it still wasn't too late for them to be saved even from themselves. 

    The thing with mental illness is that it lies. I know I say this a lot, but it's true. Your mental illness will make you think terrible things about yourself, including thoughts of how you're too far gone or have been mentally ill for too long to be helped. That's just not true. That's never true.

    Let me put it like this: Before you ever think a person, including yourself, is ever too far gone to be saved, ask yourself, "Is that person dead?" If the answer is, "No. That person is not dead." Then they can still be helped. As long as you are alive, you can still be pulled out of the dark rabbit hole of your mental illness. It doesn't matter how long you've been dealing with that mental health condition. It's never too late. You just have to be alive. 

    I'll end with this: A lot of people think that there is some kind of limit to how far somebody can go out into the land of mental illness and/or substance abuse before they can no longer find their way back. A lot of people living with mental illness and/or substance abuse often think the same thing about themselves. If you're thinking that, your unwell brain is lying to you. It doesn't matter how long or how severely you've been struggling with your condition. You can always be helped. As long as you are alive, you're never "too far gone" for help. 

Proud Work in Progress

    I've always been the kind of person, that when somebody compliments something I worked on, or even when my therapist praises the progress I've made, I'll say something like, "Yeah, I did that, but I still want to/need to (insert goal or desired amount of progress)." I've always sort of felt like, whatever progress I made didn't deserve recognition because I hadn't reached as far as I wanted to go yet, and I could only truly be praised or celebrated or complimented when I reached the goal I had in mind. I mean, you can't say how great something is while it's still in progress, you have to see it finished to decide, right?

    I do that sort of thing a lot when it comes to dealing with my OCD and panic disorder triggers. I'll do a small exposure, and then if I don't feel like I exposed myself to whatever the trigger is for as long as I imagined I would, the mission feels like a failure. My therapist is always quick to correct me. She always points out, "Yeah. You got anxious/left/turned off the thing, but you still did it. It doesn't matter that you didn't do as well as you expected yourself to, the main point is that you did it. Then you recognized your limit, and you stopped. That's good. That's progress, and it deserves to be acknowledged."

    I actually say things like this so much in my sessions that my therapist says things like, "Did you hear what you just said?" Or, "Do you realize what you just did?" Then she always goes on to explain to me that, any progress at all, even if I fell short of a goal I had in my head, still deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated. She always lets me know that, even if I know I still have work to do in an area of my life or in dealing with my mental health, I'm still allowed to be proud of how far I've come.

    I've been in therapy for six or so years at this point, and that idea still feels weird to me. I'm supposed to be proud of and happy with how far I've come when I still have so far to go? The answer, according to my therapist, is yes. YES, I AM. 

    Here's the thing about progress for most of us, but especially for those of us that live with mental illness: progress is an ongoing journey that continues for our whole lives. Humans usually don't reach a point of progress at which they say, "Okay, I'm finished with this growth business. I've made all the progress I'm going to make in my life. I'll stay like this from here on out." When we usually begin to see growth in one area that we identified and have been working on, we pick out other things that we want to grow about ourselves or in how we deal with our mental health, and we begin work on those areas. This process goes on and on, because the more you grow, the more you can find other areas that you want to work on and improve because improving generally makes us feel good about ourselves. The goal or desired level of progress and growth just keeps changing. So, if we're not proud of ourselves and happy with ourselves while we're growing, when are we ever going to be proud of ourselves and happy with ourselves?

    I can tell you that I'm still not where I want to be in terms of progress and growth. I'm still a work in progress, and I'm probably always going to be a work in progress. That's okay. I'm still proud of where I am today because, I can tell you, it's a far cry from where I was five years ago, or even a few months ago. 

    I'll end with this: If you're anything like me, you're probably too hard on yourself sometimes (or, a lot of the time). It can feel so hard to celebrate yourself and be happy with yourself and the work you're putting into yourself when all you can see if how far you have left to go instead of how far you've come. The thing is that, especially with mental health, the whole process of progress and growth can be lifelong. So, if you're not celebrating yourself while you're a work in progress, when are you going to celebrate yourself at all?

From the Outside

    I had always thought of myself as someone who had a lot of experience with mental illness. Both of my parents had clinically diagnosed mental health conditions. I watched my grandmother take anti-anxiety medication for the entire part of her life that I knew her, and I watched her still battle her anxiety even with her medication. I had other friends and loved ones who had checked into in-patient treatment for mental health concerns, many of them more than once. I also personally knew people that either struggled with suicidal ideation or had actually attempted to take their own lives. 

    Up until my own struggle with OCD and panic disorder began, I felt like I understood what it was like to have a mental health condition. I had seen my loved ones struggling and suffering with mental illness, and I thought that since I had also struggled and suffered with difficult things throughout my life, that meant I understood what they were going through. I thought all suffering was the same because from the outside looking in, suffering just looks like suffering, if that makes sense.

    Prior to the beginning of my own struggle with mental illness, all of my "experience" with mental illness had been from the outside looking in. As you can imagine, when I suddenly found myself on the inside of that struggle looking out, it was a completely new experience. Sure, I had seen mental illness in other people. Sure, I had a basic knowledge of the causes and symptoms of various mental health conditions thanks to my bachelors degree in psychology. But...neither of those things prepared me for what it was like to feel a mental health condition wreaking havoc on my mind, body, and life. 

    I had ideas of suffering and mental illness, but I honestly couldn't wrap my mind around how this "thing" could interfere so much in the lives of people so as to make it nearly impossible to get out of bed, to leave their homes, to be a functional human being, or to stay alive even, no matter how hard they tried. From the outside looking in it's so easy to mistakenly just see people that maybe aren't trying hard enough or to see people just "giving in" to their mental health condition, or people who chose "a permanent solution to a temporary problem" instead of people that have expended tremendous amounts of effort trying to be as functional and as normal as possible until their stores of energy are depleted.

    Then, it happened to me, and like many of my friends and loved ones, I found myself thinking, "Other people really don't understand what this is like. I didn't...until now." From the outside looking in, I had never experienced the kind of suffering that comes with mental illness. (Nobody tells you that it's a different kind of suffering. Not worse, better, or more traumatic...just different.) I had never experienced that kind of fear that comes with not knowing if I could trust myself and my own thoughts. I had also never experienced the kind of prolonged anguish that can make a person think it would be a blessing not to wake up the next morning until I was living in it. 

    From the outside looking in, it's so easy to pass judgement on the way people deal with their mental health. When you aren't trapped on the inside of that struggle it's so easy to say that you would have handled something differently or that you never would have allowed your mind to run away to whatever place someone else is in. You don't know what you'd do though, until it's happening to you. None of us behave as logically as we imagine we will in any given situation where fear and pain are the dominant emotions or when survival mode is activated. 

    I'll end with this: As cliché as it sounds, mental illness is one of those things that it's impossible to truly understand until it happens to you. Sure, you can have experience dealing with other people's mental health, but that experience is that of an observer watching from the outside of the struggle and the suffering, untouched by it. That experience is completely different to the experience of the person with the mental health condition who is trapped on the inside looking out, who can't have distance from it. From the outside looking in, it's so easy to view a person's struggle with mental health through the societal lens of the stigma that tells us that those people are lazy or dramatic or attention-seeking instead of simply seeing people that are trying their best with the internal and external resources that they have at any given moment. 

Just Listen to Us

    Figuring out life with mental illness can be hard, especially in the beginning. We have to figure what our triggers are. We have to figure out how to manage symptoms. We have to figure out what treatments work best for our brains. We have to figure out how to have difficult conversations with loved ones, bosses, and even potential partners about our mental health conditions. We have to figure out what bits of our old lives we get to keep and what bits we have to change for our own wellness. Basically, we have to figure out how to navigate life all over again with this new, scary thing that we have to take into account for practically every decision we make.

    The whole process is frustrating and painful, and it has probably been a trial and error process for us, but then....we figure it out. We figure out how to identify and handle existing and potential triggers, how to manage the symptoms, how to live as fully as possible while we keep an eye on our ever-present mental health condition and travel along our wellness journey.

    While we're figuring things out for ourselves, our loved ones are also trying to figure it all out alongside us. They see us struggling. They see us at our worst when our mental illness is wreaking havoc on us and our lives, and they hate it. Our loved ones would more than likely do anything to make our suffering stop, but they have no idea how to make it stop. They can't take away the mental illness, and so this might lead our loved ones to try to protect us from our mental health condition. 

    In an effort to help us manage our mental illness, our loved ones can sometimes make mental health decisions for us to avoid certain situations because they assume the situation will be a trigger. Sometimes, even when we insist that we would be fine in X situation, our loved ones will stand firm and say something along the lines of, "No. That will definitely make you (insert symptoms here). I know it will. So we just won't do that/watch that/talk about that."

    While we understand that this protectiveness comes from a place of love, it's not the most helpful attitude to have when dealing with someone else's mental health condition. Just because we have a mental health condition doesn't mean that we're like children that don't know what's best for ourselves or how to take care of ourselves. We've put in the work in therapy to learn these exact things.

    It would be so much more helpful if they just asked us, "Are you okay if we do this/watch this/talk about this today?" and then ACTUALLY LISTENED TO US when we gave them an answer. If we've been living with our mental illness for some time, and especially if we've spent some time in therapy, we know our mental health boundaries. We know when it's a good time to challenge our mental illness and when it's a good time to leave or avoid a situation to be kind to ourselves. So, if we say we'll be fine in a situation, we mean it, because we wouldn't risk creating a bad mental health day just to prove a point. If we legitimately feel like it might be a bad day to be exposed to anything we can opt out of, we'll tell you that. 

    Also, if something has been a trigger for us in the past, that doesn't mean that same thing will ALWAYS be a trigger for our mental illness. We can and do work through some things like that in therapy so that we don't make avoidance the default coping mechanism. You can always ask, "I know this has been a trigger in the past, but how do you feel about it now?" instead of assuming that it's still an issue. We know that if we want to maintain wellness it's best to answer questions like this honestly instead of giving you the answer we think you want from us.

       On another level, just assuming that something will be triggering and then telling us that you know a certain thing will be triggering isn't a good idea. If we aren't careful, thinking about why you think something would be triggering (especially when we're dealing with intrusive thoughts) can create a trigger where there wasn't one before. 

    Loved ones can still be protective, and we appreciate that in the right context. Save the protectiveness for when someone is arguing that our mental illness isn't a real illness or when we confront someone for using our mental illness as a "quirky" personality trait. That's when we need it. We don't really need it when we're just making decisions about what we can handle in regard to our mental health condition. Odds are, after some time in therapy and after we've (mostly) figured out how to navigate life with our mental illness, we don't need you to try to protect us from ourselves or our mental health conditions as much as you still think we do. (But we love you for wanting to.)

    I'll end with this: I know, you want to figure out any way you can to protect someone you care about from the suffering that comes with their mental health condition. However, when it comes to trying to help someone manage their mental illness, making the decision for them to avoid certain things without talking to them about it isn't the most helpful thing you can do. We're so glad you want to help, and honestly, the most helpful thing you can do is listen to us about dealing with our own mental health condition. It's okay to just ask, "Do you feel okay with X?" instead of just assuming you know best because you love them.

Peaceful Co-Existence

    When I was first learning to live with mental illness after my diagnosis, I thought of my OCD and panic disorder as things I needed to control in order to become and then to maintain my wellness. My mindset when it came to my mental health conditions was, "I will fight you, and I will win. I won't let you interfere with my life." I viewed my OCD and panic disorder as some unruly creature that I had to keep on a tight leash, lest it have too much wiggle room and ruin everything I had worked for.

    This "control" approach left me feeling exhausted, hopeless, and miserable more often than not. I was basically just surviving instead of truly thriving and growing because I was constantly on guard, worried that my mental illness was going to break through my carefully held control and undo every little bit of progress I was making. I was never not worried about what my mental illness was doing. (Spoiler: This whole "control" idea I had was really giving my mental illness more control over me and not the other way around.) By always being worried that my control of my mental illness would lapse and result in disaster, I was pretty much consumed by my conditions. This didn't leave enough space for me to nurture my actual self, the person who existed separate from the mental illness that forms who I am as a person with a healthier brain. (Hint: You can't truly heal if you don't nurture your actual self that is separate from the mental illness along with managing the mental illness itself.)

    The thing I realized a little bit later than I should have is that mental illness can't be controlled. None of us can control whether or not we live with mental illness, or whether or not it interferes with our lives from time to time, even with medication. We can, however, control how we interact with our mental illness. This realization prompted a change to a healthier, more accurate way of thinking about and living with my mental health conditions.  

    These days, instead of control, I strive for peaceful co-existence with my OCD and panic disorder. My mindset now is, "You're here. I'm here. Neither of us is going anywhere, so let's figure out how we can have a healthy balance within this space we share." (The shared space is my mind and body.) I allow my anxiety to take up an amount of space that I don't feel is frightening or overwhelming (because your mental illness is going to take up space whether you want it to or not) while I exist and function alongside the mental illness in enough space that allows me to thrive and to grow so that healing can happen. 

    With peaceful co-existence my focus is no longer my mental illness and how it can wreak havoc. My focus now is how I can help myself can feel balanced and "human" all the time, even on a day when I'm experiencing symptoms of my mental health condition. It's a much gentler and kinder way of dealing with my OCD and panic disorder, and it leaves me the space and time I need to learn about my actual self as I heal and grow.

    I'll end with this: When we strive to control our mental illness, the thought seems to be, "This can't be here," which isn't healthy, realistic or kind to ourselves. Life with a mental health condition is hard enough, and we don't need to make it harder by trying to control a thing that isn't controllable. Shifting our thinking so that we strive for peaceful co-existence, where the focus is, "Let's figure out how to find a balance between our actual self and the mental health condition in this shared mind and body," is healthier, more realistic, and kinder to ourselves. 

But...That's Not Real

    Part of living with OCD is dealing with intrusive thoughts and the irrational fears that those intrusive thoughts can cause. And I have a few: demonic possession from the years before I was diagnosed; the whole death by cleaning products issue that I mentioned in a previous post; unknowingly and accidently being the cause of someone's death; and most recently, since we've been living through a major health crisis, contamination. (I'm sure I have more, but let's not go down that rabbit hole today.)

    The pattern is always the same: I have an intrusive thought that is triggered by something, like a situation, a person, an event, or something else external. The intrusive thought leads to an irrational (meaning not based in reality) fear of the thing from the intrusive thoughts. The irrational fear leads to a physical response (AKA my anxiety and panic attacks). Then I'm left in a battle between trying to maintain my healthy patterns or reverting back to old, unhealthy patterns that involve compulsions to make the fear and the physical response stop.

    All the while that I'm experiencing the irrational fear and the anxiety that was caused by my irrational fear, I know it's not rational. I know I don't logically need to be afraid of the thing that I'm afraid of. While my anxiety is building up, even all the way to the tipping point, and sometimes even during a panic attack, I know I don't need to have such fear of the thing. I also know, logically, that I don't need to be anxious about the the thing that I'm anxious about. I am fully aware the whole time I'm lost in the land of irrationality that I'm being irrational, and I hate it. I hate that the fear and the anxiety keep happening anyway even though I know it's not a "real" fear.

    I was talking to my therapist about this very thing in my last phone session with her. I was telling her how much it bothered me to be anxious about a thing, and to know, logically, that I was being irrational while still being unable to stop the anxiety. 

    My therapist was quick to stop me from being too harsh with myself. She explained to me that the brain hasn't yet evolved enough in its most primal areas to be able to tell the difference between a real fear and an imagined fear. The brain just recognizes fear, and then it sounds the alarm so my survival instincts kick in. Then, because I can't run away from or fight my irrational OCD fears, I'm left with anxiety since the extra adrenaline, tense muscles, and all the things that go into the fight or flight response aren't actually put to use.

    So, *I* know my fear is irrational and not a thing that is really likely to happen. My brain, however, does not, and my brain, since it controls what chemicals get released into my body, wins a lot of the time. I can desensitize myself to the fear and lessen the emotional response over time with exposure and response prevention therapy, though, but even with ERP it'll take time for my emotional brain to catch up with my logical brain.

    I'll end with this: Just because somebody knows a fear is irrational doesn't mean that they can just stop having an anxiety response to that fear. A person can be fully aware they're being irrational, and yet they won't be able to stop the fear and the anxiety because the brain doesn't know the difference between a rational (real) and an irrational (not real) fear. The brain only has one blanket response when it comes to fear, and that setting is, "DANGER! DANGER! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!" So, it doesn't matter if the fear isn't actually a "real" thing because the brain treats every fear as real, which can leave a great many of us left to battle anxiety and panic attacks when we can't run from or fight those fears that live inside our heads until we work to desensitize ourselves.

The Child Inside the Grown Up

     Let me start by explaining something about myself. As a child, I had an irrational fear of "chemicals", specifically things like Lysol, Bleach, SOS scrubber pads, floor cleaners, carpet cleaners, toilet cleaners...anything that you would use to clean something besides soap and water or rubbing alcohol or a non-toxic wipe. I was TERRIFIED of them. If I ever accidently stepped on a freshly mopped floor, a freshly shampooed carpet, or touched a freshly bleached dish or countertop, I just knew that was the end of me. I just knew that "chemical" was going to somehow get absorbed into my body through my skin, and that shortly after, I was going to die. (I could even die by showering or bathing in a freshly, chemically-cleaned bathtub because, what if it wasn't rinsed properly, and what if the steam from the hot water made me inhale some toxic fumes from the cleaning products?!) My mom had to rinse our tub multiple times before I would get into it after she cleaned it. 

    (Looking back at things like this, I can see how I may have developed OCD as an adult...)

    Fast-forward to the present, when I decided to be a "real adult" and clean my bathtub myself, with actual cleaning products instead of asking my mom to do it. (My mom knew I had this irrational fear of death by "chemicals" and so was always willing to do it.) Had I grown out of my irrational fear of being exposed to "chemicals"? Apparently not, my friends. I even had gloves on, but that didn't stop the panic that welled up inside me as soon as I was wrist-deep in blue SOS-colored water, trying to scrub my bathtub. I JUST KNEW that "chemical" was going to somehow absorb through my gloves, through my skin, and I was going to die because I had touched it.

    That fear sounds so child-like doesn't it? I never hear of adults being so afraid of things like Lysol, Bleach, SOS scrubber pads, and other cleaning products that they have a panic attack when forced to touch them. I brought that up with my therapist in our phone session this weekend. 

    My therapist was quick to point out that my fear didn't make me childish. She explained that my fear of the cleaning "chemicals" had resulted in traumatic experiences during childhood in which I was sure I was going to die.  As a result of that trauma, the fear part of my brain had sort of unpacked and lived in that young age in which the trauma had occurred. The part that held this fear hadn't grown up along with the rest of me, so to speak, which is often how trauma and fear work inside our minds. So, during this process of cleaning my bathtub, that fear piece of my brain from childhood resurfaced, and I experienced it all over again. 

    Adult me had to meet child me as I completed my triggering task. I had to be kind and understanding with that child self still living inside the adult if I wanted to be able to process my fear. Believing you're going to fall over dead because you accidently got something on your skin is a traumatic experience for anyone, but especially for a child. I made sure not to think to myself that the fear was silly or stupid. (Although I did acknowledge that it was an irrational fear.) I acknowledged that felt like the real fear that my childhood self was sure it was, but then I told myself, "I'm an adult now, and I even have gloves on. I've touched this accidently before and survived. I'll survive this time, too. I don't have to be terrified. I just have to be careful. I've seen my mother use these very cleaning products for years WITHOUT GLOVES, and she's not dead. So, I can be okay."

    I had to meet the fear on it's own level, and then treat it like the developmental age it was frozen in without judgement. Once I did that, and I talked myself through it, I was able to complete the task. By the time I finished, I had stopped crying, at least, and I no longer thought I was going to die. I was still anxious, but I wasn't having a full-on panic attack.

    I'll end with this: As adults, we often judge ourselves for the fears that resulted from trauma (both "small" and "big" traumas) that we experienced as children, especially if that fear plays a part in a mental illness that develops later. We often feel silly or embarrassed if something happens that triggers the memory of that childhood traumatic experience and the fear in our adult lives, and we try to dismiss it. (I felt embarrassed crying into my bathtub as I battled with the fear that I was going to die because of the cleaning products I was using. I felt even worse when I linked the obsessive way I used to worry about that to my OCD diagnosis from adulthood.) Dismissing it won't heal that child-like fear inside us, though. To heal that child-like fear, we have to meet it at the development level it lives in, and we have to be kind to it, to lend it that feeling of adult-like safety before it can heal.