#was the result of saying ‘give me your most resilient therapist’

[uswe]

Not sure if I am broken by dint of burnout or grad school or overwork or disability. I would like to create again. But my notes document with fic ideas has been untouched since my performance review and realizing I need to publish more papers.

Probably a therapist would help? But a dentist is more urgent. Also nagging the plumber.

[4evamc]

Misha Tweets

Transcript

Ed Levine: Welcome to Special Sauce 2.0. Serious Eats podcast about food and life. Every week on Special Sauce we begin with Ask Kenji, where Kenji Lopez-Alt, Serious Eats Chief Culinary Consultant, gives the definitive answer to the question of the week that a serious eater like you has sent us.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt: Generally, sort of like delicate leafy herbs like cilantro, parsley, basil, they tend to not be very good in their dried counterparts. Thyme, rosemary, oregano, they actually work pretty well in their dried forms.

EL: After Ask Kenji, a conversation with our guest, today in house, Misha Collins. He is, of course, an actor best known for his role as the angel, Castiel. Did I pronounce that right?

Misha Collins: Castiel.

EL: On the CW television series Supernatural, and has now written with his wife Vicki Collins, The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Time.

EL: Now it's time to meet Misha Collins. He's, of course, an actor best known for his role as the angel, Castiel?

Misha Collins: Castiel.

EL: On the CW television series Supernatural, which has had an insane run, right? It's like 2008 to 2019.

MC: Yeah, we're in our 15th season right now.

EL: That never happens.

MC: No, it doesn't. I don't know why they kept us on the air.

EL: Collins is also the co-founder and board president of Random Acts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding and inspiring acts of kindness around the world. He's also a published poet. Very impressive dude.

MC: Thank you.

EL: And has now written with his wife Vicky Collins, The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Time. So welcome to Special Sauce, Misha.

MC: I'm very happy to be here.

EL: So the first question I always ask, in your case it's particularly relevant, is tell us about life at your family table growing up. Your family table was not exactly traditional.

MC: That is true. I was raised by a single mom. My parents separated when I was three years old and I visited my father on every other weekend for most of my childhood, but he wasn't really a cornerstone of my upbringing. But my mother and my brother and our dog were a very tight family unit, and we lived in Western Massachusetts primarily growing up and moved a lot. We were in a new home I would say on average once every nine months or so. I think I lived in 15 places by the time I was 15.

EL: So you were like an Army brat, only you were a different kind of brat.

MC: Right. An Army brat without the parents building up a pension plan.

EL: Right.

MC: Another thing I think that an Army brat family has is a cadre possibly, of other kids that are going through the same experience, and I was generally going to a new school every year and meeting kids that were in fairly stable childhoods and who knew one another and who were familiar with the school, so I was always approaching schools and new towns-

EL: You were the permanent new kid.

MC: Yeah, with a little bit of trepidation, and trying to figure out how I could ingratiate myself to the new communities and the new schools. My mother was very eccentric and iconoclastic. She talked about the revolution a lot. I was born in 1974, and we lived through a tumultuous political time in our country, and she didn't want to have us grow up being conventional young men, so she would do things like dress me up in pink tights and paint my nails and send me off to Cub Scouts. Which I think in 2020 might actually fly, but in a working class community in Massachusetts, when you show up at Cub Scouts in the boys' locker room with nail polish and long hair-

EL: Not so much.

MC: And pink tights, you're ostracized. So, I kind of had to find a way to blend in and disappear a little bit as a kid in new schools, and I think that it built a lot of character in a lot of ways, and made me more resilient and adaptable and independent than I otherwise would have been. But at the same time, there's a certain lack of stable foundation that was challenging.

EL: I had not the same kinds of travails in my own childhood, but you do become resilient and eminently adaptable, but it also has a cost. It exacts a cost that you can't deal with as you're going through it, but you almost have to deal with it at some point in order to really resolve some of the issues that came out of it, I assume.

MC: Yeah. I'm sure you've found the same thing, but I feel like I'm a 45-year-old man and I'm still discovering things and unpacking them and repairing them, I think. There are definitely things that you take away from a childhood like that that give you real strength.

One of the things that I love about my childhood is that I know that you don't need money to be happy and you can get by on just about nothing, and that gives you, I think, quite a bit of power going into the world because you don't feel beholden to the comforts of ... I don't feel beholden to the comforts of money. I'm okay with scarcity. At the same time, I don't know that I was really terribly good at connecting with people or making friends, and I probably still struggle with that.

EL: Yeah. So, you wrote this amazing piece in The Times, and you wrote that “times were often lean, but one luxury we always had an abundance was food, even if it came by the five finger discount. My mother taught me how to steal peaches from the Stop and Shop grocery store when I was four. We were stealing from the man. It was a justified rebellion against an unjust system.”

EL: So, whoa. Okay, those sentences made me stop in my tracks. That's pretty intense. I was actually thinking about this movie, Shoplifters. I don't if you've ever seen it.

MC: Oh yeah. Yeah.

EL: Because in there the father figure, who turns out not to be the father, teaches the kids how to steal so they can eat. And so, wow. I mean, talk about that. Talk about getting conflicting messages from your mother. It's like, whoa.

MC: It's funny, because now hearing you read that, it paints a portrait of a parent who was raising children without a moral compass, and I think that was not at all the case. This was righteous rebellion. We were stealing ... We would never have stolen from the local co-op, but this was from a corporate entity, and these corporations were out to exploit the proletariat. I actually felt the exhilaration of feeling like I was part of a rebellion at that point, and frankly indoctrinated into that at a really young age. At the age of four, I was aware that it was us against them. We were the little guys and that we had a justice on our side. At the same time, it's a complicated thing to be training a little four year old how to steal.

MC: I have a very distinct memory of the fruit island in the Stop and Shop, and me grabbing a peach. This was the first time that I remember ever shoplifting anything. I grabbed the peach and then I ducked down behind the island, and my mother said, "No, no, no, no, no. You can't do it like that. You have to take it. You have to be very calm. You have to not look around. You can't show that you're distressed at all or that you're nervous, and then you put it in your backpack." Then we would go up to the cash register and we would pay for some of the groceries, so that we were distracting them, and then scoot out the door.

EL: And you just, I assume, felt that there was nothing particularly abnormal about this because you had nothing to compare it to.

MC: Right. Yeah, this was my normal.

EL: Yeah. You weren't stealing from somebody or something that needed the money, you were stealing as part of an ethos. Right?

MC: Right.

EL: As part of like, this is the way we work the system to fight the man.

MC: Right, precisely. Yeah.

EL: You also wrote, and I'm going to quote a couple of more sentences from the piece because it was so beautiful, "My upbringing taught me you didn't need money to be happy, that you didn't have to play by the rules, that the whole world was just begging to be explored. But now by the hindsight of fatherhood and from the comfort of a therapist's couch, I see that while my childhood had been rife with adventure, it also had been lonely and frightening and wanting." So you were always reconciling those two things, weren't you?

MC: I wouldn't say I was always reconciling them, because as a child I struggled at times. I felt sad and lonely, but I didn't think that it was because of my childhood.

EL: Got it.

MC: I thought my childhood was full of adventure, and I was proud of my childhood. Up until when I was 25 I don't think I looked back on it and thought that there had been any damage done by that.

EL: Right, and that there was anything dysfunctional about it.

MC: Right. And on balance, my childhood was incredibly ... I think I had a secure attachment with my mother. My mother was there. She was loving. She never failed to convey that love to me and my brother. So she served as my anchor emotionally, and that was unfailing. But because the rest of our life was so fractured and so nomadic, she was my only anchor.

EL: Yeah, because as you said, how do you establish connections with any kids when you're moving every few months?

MC: Right, and when you're showing up at school in pink tights at a working class school you're also getting alienated by your peers, and so the other kids actually ended up being kind of frightening to me.

EL: I read your Wikipedia page, and somehow you escaped and you ended up at a prep school, Northfield Mount Hermon, and then the University of Chicago. What a narrative your life has been. How did that happen?

MC: Now that you're asking the question, I'm reflecting on it possibly for the first time. But one thing that I know happened as a result of my childhood and and partly as a result of feeling like I wasn't fitting in with other kids, is that I was a smart kid and I could win the favor of my teachers. So when I was in school, I did very well in school. It was like the thing I could throw myself into and be safe and get some accolades.

EL: Some positive feedback.

MC: And some positive reinforcement. So I did well in school, and we lived in the town of Northfield for a little while, which was where Northfield Mount Hermon is. They had a program that had been implemented from the inception of the school where local day students could get pretty much a full ride if they were in need, and we were in need, so I could go to a fancy high school for free as a day student. Then I ended up basically getting the same deal at the University of Chicago.

EL: Amazing.

MC: Yeah. At the time, I thought I was going to go into politics, so I was sort of on a very clear path. And that wanting to go into politics was also born of my childhood and of my mother talking about politics all the time, and making me and my brother very aware of the plight of people in need in our country and around the world. It felt like that was the right place for me.

EL: Yeah. Again, and this is the final sentences I'm going to read from the Times piece, because it gets us back to food. Which is, "I recently found an old journal in a box in the back of my closet, and on the page from a decade ago where I had taken inventory of the good and bad of my upbringing the word cooking is circled and underlined with urgency in the plus column, as if I was thinking that food had been the cornerstone of happiness in my youth." Elaborate on that. I mean, that's an amazing statement.

MC: I think as a nomadic family, we moved around and we brought with us what we could, and in terms of material objects, there was very little that was a through line. But we did bring with us from place to place the tradition of sitting down for family meals every night.

EL: Even if you were in a teepee or in a park.

MC: Right. Even if we were sitting on a log in the woods in the rain, we would be sitting down and eating together. There were no distractions. There was never a television on, and there was no coercion in getting to the dinner table. There was no question about it. Not because it was an edict from an authority figure, but because we all just coalesced around dinner and loved it.

EL: You needed it.

MC: Yeah.

EL: It was a permanent form of glue for the family, right?

MC: Yeah. It really was important to us. We would go spend Christmas with my mother's mother, my grandmother, and she was a cook as well, and food was a centerpiece of that family interaction. And for me now that I have kids, I notice that when I'm feeling like a guilty or absent father, the way that I most quickly show my affection and love for my kids is I just make them food. It's like the way that I know to convey to a child everything's safe, everything's okay, and I love you.

EL: Yeah. But in 21st century America, and maybe all around the world, it's hard to do that, right? There are lots of pressures that are forcing people not to eat together.

MC: Right.

EL: Both parents are working, kids are all over the place. But you obviously, I think as a result of your upbringing, it was important when you had a family and a wife that you made that same time for dinner.

MC: Yeah. It feels very important to me. I think sometimes I'm actually kind of maybe forcing my agenda of cooking on my kids. Like, "Come on guys, let's make something in the kitchen." A lot of times they want to go outside and I want to work in the kitchen, and I have to check myself and say, "Okay, we'll go play a little bit of soccer first before we get to canning the pears."

EL: Right. Because the act of eating a meal and preparing it is imbued with so much more meaning for you than it is for them.

MC: Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah.

EL: So you end up being an actor, and I'm just assuming that like all actors, you struggled for many years before you found yourself on the set of Supernatural. So, tell us in a few sentences the arc of your acting career.

MC: Well as I mentioned earlier, my intention after college was to go into politics. I interned at the White House and I got a job at NPR in Washington, DC, and I was really disappointed with what I saw at the White House, and I thought, "Oh God, I have to come up with a whole new plan here." I thought it was going to be the best and the brightest minds under one roof. This was the Clinton administration. And instead what I found was the halls were filled with people who were sycophants, whose parents had donated money to the campaign. They were all yaysayers. There was no real discourse about political ideas, which of course is actually what you need in an administration. You need people who are going to be in lock step and are going to support your decisions, but I was too young and naive to know that.

So when I saw it, I thought, "This is not for me." I thought, "I will try to find another way that I can have an impact." I think there's a lot of hubris in this, but I thought, "I know what I'll do. I'll become an actor. I'll get famous and then I'll parlay my celebrity into some sort of political influence."

EL: Oh, because that happens all the time.

MC: Right. I mean really, really completely naive, and totally full of myself. Then I moved to LA and I thought it was going to take a couple of years to attain a certain level-

EL: To become rich and famous.

MC: To be rich and famous. And it took a long time to become-

EL: It took a decade, probably.

MC: To become moderately comfortable and a C-list celebrity. But somewhere along the line I stopped thinking about that end goal of I'm on this path so that I can have influence, blah blah blah, and I just started becoming an actor, and I was just acting for the sake of acting and not for this aspirational, high-minded goal.

Then a couple of years ago we got a new president, and that lit a fire under me. It was actually during the campaign when I started to think, "Oh, Trump might get elected. Oh, this is serious," and then my C-list celebrity started to come into play and I thought, "All right, well I can use the platform that I have."

EL: By the way, I think it's at least B-minus, okay?

MC: Well you, as everyone knows, grade on a curve, so thank you for your charity. In a strange way it feels to me a little bit like it's come full circle, and now that the show's ending and after 15 seasons I'm asking the question, "Okay, how can I be of use in the world?" I don't know what's next for me. I don't know if I spend a lot of time on television sets after this or not. I'm trying to do some soul searching and figure out what I really want to be when I grow up. But that's, in a nutshell, my path.

EL: It's an amazing path, and you accomplished much more as an actor than almost any actor I know. To be a working actor and to have made some money doing it is actually an incredible accomplishment, and maybe it's to the resilience you discovered you had in your childhood.

MC: Yeah, I think possibly. I think obviously there's a lot of dumb luck that comes into play. It's not my fault that the show that I'm on has been on for 15 seasons or has the devoted fan base that it has.

EL: There are conventions for Supernatural. I notice this-

MC: We have conventions. There are tattoos with face on them. I mean, it's hard not to be full of yourself in this context. But yeah, we have a really, really devoted fan base, and it's quite remarkable to be a part of.

What was it? I think it was Freakonomics at one point. Maybe it was in the book Freakonomics, but they said that pursuing a career in acting is like pursuing a career as a drug dealer. It's very, very difficult to be one of the kingpins, to be successful in the field.

EL: Right.

MC: The odds are so bad that it takes a certain personality that's defective that wants to even pursue that in the first place, because 99 out of 100 people are going to fail at that and then you're just going to be a low level street corner drug dealer, or barely getting food on your table as a background actor.

EL: Yeah. Well Misha, we have to leave it right here for this episode of Special Sauce, but you're going to stick around and tell us all about your two terrific kids, West and Maison.

MC: We just say Mason.

EL: West and Mason.

MC: Yes, we anglicize the French spelling.

EL: And your wife Vicki, and your family collaboration on The Adventurous Eaters Club. Thank you for spending so much time with us on Special Sauce.

MC: Thank you so much for having me, and I can't wait to talk about the book.

Listen to the podcast here

[threecheersforsuccess]

Uni Study Diary 18th Entry: How My Love for Habits/Finding Study Techniques Made Me Realize What Major I Should Pursue

For those who do not know, I recently started clinical research at my first lab of choice when applying to a competitive summer program at my university. I would like to preface by saying that I cannot give any of the details because of confidentiality, as much as I would like to track my work so far. However, looking back at my successful application and organizing the thoughts I’ve been having over the week, my investment in studyblr/studygram, the growth mindset, and the challenges I’ve personally had when experimenting productivity techniques and habit-building really all have funneled into the reason why I chose to pursue neuroscience and psychology in the first place. 

In both middle school and high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do in college. I started out thinking that I might do an engineering major or maybe something in computer science, but honestly, most of that came from the influences and pressures of friends and mutuals working jobs at big tech companies in Seattle, and my passion for that generally ran low. I absolutely loved math and science, and I loved biology and physics in particular. Towards my last two years of high school, I did HOSA (Health Occupations of Students America), and this allowed me to work on several health-based projects, from curriculum building in health education to technological innovations. These hands-on opportunities and guidance from professionals brought me a lot of fulfillment; as I read through scientific papers and connected the dots, I found myself amazed by my ability to synthesize data and put the knowledge into creating tangible solutions. I did consider bioengineering for some time because of this, but I did not feel too sure. 

Between late middle school and all throughout high school, I ran this blog and my Instagram, mainly inspired by those tip posts created by other accounts. I would collect as many tip posts I could and determine my own style of studying, whether for class, AP classes, cram school, etc. Studyblr made this process so fun to me, and combined with my interest in the growth mindset and the habit cycle, I would experiment as much as I could to figure out solutions that worked best for me. I began to look outside of Tumblr and Instagram, looking at scientific journals and learning about some pretty awesome methods, such different forms of active recall and spaced repetition. I will say that at that time, I had that innate, childish desire to figure out a clean-cut ways and write up an overall guide that would be able to tackle all scenarios to maximize grades and learning (different subjects, bad teachers, etc), but of course, I’ve matured, and I’ve realized that how you study or build habits may not necessarily apply to someone else. As a result, you can only give advice, but those methods may not work. Yes, I learned this the hard way in college because I ultimately learned that my own studying style is far too unique and does match up to what others suggest, so I have to experiment a lot to figure out what is best for me. The variability is far too much to actually understand what works for each and individual person. Long story short, I am still a habit-building nut (I have yet to show all of my beeminder trackers on my platform haha).

Therefore, I’ve settled to pursue neuro/psych as my major, and my research project right now is very much enjoyable because it does focus on habit-building techniques and curriculum construction for adolescents for certain medical/psychological conditions. I think it’s absolutely amazing to see how my passions all funneled into one nicely wrapped present at the end, and this is something I am grateful for. During my mental health hiatus, when working with my therapist, one thing I learned is to sit with your feelings and confront them, negative and positive. By highlighting the positive ones in times of darkness, this can be a habit as well that can be strengthened into something of a regular occurrence, helping to build resilience. When I feel stressed about the future or my academics, I do think about how fortunate I am to be able to pursue something I love (definitely with the side of facing those negative emotions as well and problem-solving my way through those, but you get what I mean here). I have so much more to say, especially in regards to health intersectionality and reasons why I have finally solidified my position as a premed student in general, but I’m going to do some ANKI cards for now.  

[rotationalsymmetry]

Commenting on without reblogging. (Thing is about: communicating about what you’re upset about with your partner or whomever and not making them guess.) (I don’t remember if the original post was partner specific or like...roommates. I’m thinking about partners, but this can apply to roommate conflicts as well, and anyone else you spend enough time with that you’re around each other when you’re not at your best. I’m mostly assuming one on one situations — this can be generalized to larger groups, but with 3 or more people there’s additional dynamics in play and I’m not sure how to comment on that here:)

Yes, and also I think this tends to be harder than a lot of people realize. As in: if just being told you should do that is enough, great. If not...

For those of us who would basically rather die than talk to our parents about our feelings as teens and didn’t have anyone else we could talk to about our feelings to either, it can be really hard to transition into adult relationships of equals and trust that the other person actually cares about our feelings.

For people who have especially extreme or unusual emotional reactions due to mental illness, ADHD, etc, identifying our feelings let alone talking about them can be extra hard.

For many people, figuring out how to say “I’m upset as a result of you doing x” without implying “I think it’s bad that you did x” can be challenging. Especially since a lot of people are primed to automatically hear the first as the second.

This can be even harder if you’re not sure whether you do think that it’s bad that the other person did x or not.

I don’t know what to say about people coming from abusive families, but I’m sure that adds extra layers of difficulty one way or another. Also previous abusive romantic relationships.

Basically we usually learn how to do this stuff by it being modeled to us, and a lot of us didn’t get that modeling. (Or for various reasons, got it modeled but didn’t pick it up. Or our problems and our role models’ problems are different enough that it’s not all that useful.)

Some people find it difficult to form words or say certain kinds of things under stress. This can look like deliberately choosing to stay silent when it’s actually not a choice.

The fight-or-flight stress response makes it harder to use the parts of your brain that control impulses and make rational, thought out decisions. So, knowing what to do when you’re calm and being able to do it when you’re aroused are very different things. Even more so if you’re getting into shut down/dissociation territory. (This is why “take some time apart to calm down” is such common relationship advice.)

Sometimes not only is it hard for B to read A’s feelings, but B might get it wrong. Some people look calm when they’re angry, sound angry when they’re scared, cry when they’re not sad, etc.

Oh, and also some people don’t have close relationships (or healthy close relationships) until relatively late in life, and are making their newbie relationship mistakes much later than most people.

So, what can you do?

Talk about conflicts when you’re not actively in conflict.

Make a plan for how you’re going to deal with intense feelings and/or sustained bad moods ahead of time; know your coping strategies. Let your partner know ahead of time what sorts of things tend to make you feel better or worse.

Look up communication advice (“I feel” statements etc) and either generate some rules of the road together as a couple (/household/polycule/whatever) or make some personal guidelines for yourself. (If you don’t always follow them it happens — this isn’t about whoever messes up first loses the argument, it’s about if you mess up you try to do better next time.)

If you want to keep the relationship, make sure you have a lot more positive interactions than negative ones. Even if there’s big disagreements that need to be talked through, it’s OK to take breaks and have time where you focus on enjoying each other’s company. If you’re in a frame of mind where you can do that.

Likewise, remember to say positive things about your partner etc even when you’re in conflict. “I care about you”, “I want to work through this together”, “thanks for hearing me out”, etc. You do not lose the fight by saying nice things. (Or if you do...maybe your problem isn’t a communication one.)

If either person wants to take a break from a difficult conversation, you take a break.

Think about who else you can talk to about this, or how else you can process the situation. It’s not necessarily a good idea to talk about all your relationship fights with a close family member (or another partner if you’re polyamorous) but often it’s a good idea to talk to someone. So...therapist? Bartender? Hotline volunteer? Random social media “let’s be nice to each other” group? Your dog? Maybe you’d just as soon write in your journal or go for a long walk? Sometimes if you process your feelings first, you end up having a much more constructive talk later on.

Be in process. Learning how to have healthy relationships involves a lot of highly complex and subtle skills. It’s work. It takes time. As with learning to play a musical instrument, you have to do it badly before you can do it well.

What if communication doesn’t help?

Maybe the way you tried it didn’t work or the timing was bad. Give it some time and try again later. (If it’s a big dealbreaker thing or potentially a big dealbreaker thing, get some distance if possible — communication isn’t a substitute for boundaries, and neither is patience or love or forgiveness.)

If there’s a consistent pattern of talking it out not working, or the other person seems to be acting deliberately cruel, this is probably not a good relationship (/living situation) for you. Good communication can’t make another person respect you, it only smooths things over between people who basically like and respect each other.

Couple’s counseling/family counseling is an option in some cases. I recommend only doing this if you basically trust that the other person cares about and respects you and it’s more about getting back to a previously happy relationship than trying to fix a relationship that was broken from the start. In a hostile roommate situation if you can’t move out yet, or if you’re in something that you know is a bad relationship but can’t break up yet, what you want is more boundaries, not better communication. Individual therapy might help with that, but family or couple’s therapy is generally more focused on gaining more closeness and mutual understanding, and less about setting boundaries and getting distance.

Some resources (books unless stated otherwise, authors left out because I’m feeling too lazy to look them all up but I can clarify on request):

Non-violent Communication (the book, but there’s also workshops etc): not everyone’s cup of tea, other people swear by it. It’s set up skills first/explanations second, so I recommend reading the second half first but you do you. If it’s not your thing, that’s OK.

Difficult Conversations

Feeling Good Together: this is a weird ass book, and does not differentiate between healthy relationships and abusive ones, but I’m still recommending it because the “five secrets of effective communication” is actually the communication advice that works best for me in the moment. (The “five secrets” can also be found if you poke around the Feeling Good podcast, which is free.)

Oh, yeah the Feeling Good book and the Feeling Good podcast in general, for people with depression, anxiety, etc. (note: the author/host ...has some very strong opinions, be willing to filter. There’s a ton of practical advice though, so I’m still recommending it.)

The Dance of Anger: short on practical tips, but pretty neat on theory.

Anything about CBT or DBT, or really anything else on emotional management written by therapy people.

I’m especially fond of Taming Your Gremlin on the “learn better coping strategies” front: it’s short, it’s got humor, it’s friendly to people with short attention spans, it does kinda do the “co-opting mindfulness concepts for personal gain” thing but that’s pretty hard to avoid these days, sigh.

Bouncing Back (about resilience and healing from trauma, science based but written for people who aren’t science people)

Burnout (about stress, ditto on the science thing, aimed at women, 10/10 recommend)

The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook (why so much about stress? Because dealing with “stress” is also dealing with fear and anger and hurt and resentment and frustration, that’s why. And because we all know that “stress is bad” and we’re supposed to do something about it, but most people think that means just avoiding stressful situations and WRONG.) (If you just read one, pick Burnout. But, the Workbook has a chapter on anger management so I’m including it for that if nothing else.)

How To ADHD YouTube videos, for people with ADHD and those who love them.

[daughterofelros]

Hey so I saw your post about Alex and his resilience and how he's rate on a scale and how this relates to his childhood trauma etc and was really curious to know/understand more on the topic and how it manifests with alex but also you mentioned rosa? And the other characters too. If you're happy to elaborate otherwise no worries of course. What interpretations do you make from what we've seen on screen? ☺

Oh my gosh Nonnie, thank you for the juicy, delicious ask!

The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (Commonly abbreviated to CD-RISC) measures, in its full version, 25 different statements. Some of the ones that stand out to me in thinking about a bunch of the RNM characters include being able to adapt and change, having close and secure relationships, able to make unpopular/difficult decisions, know where to get help, but they’re all pretty important.

As established in my earlier assessment, Alex Manes = Super Resilient, and that definitely has an effect on the ways he handles the traumas he’s faced over his life.

Let me dive into Rosa little bit more first— Rosa, despite not enduring the specific type of abuse that Alex and Michael did as kids, might actually score in a lower percentile than either of those characters on the resilience scale. Part of this is because adverse childhood experiences, though cumulative, aren’t exactly ranked and scaled. Trauma impacts people differently, and you can’t really say whether growing up feeling abandoned by an alcoholic parent in an otherwise supportive context, or never having a safe parental figure, or having a parent die will impact someone “worse”—they’re all adversity, and they all have an impact on our health and capacity for resilience. (Also, inequality isn’t a fixed experience in our brains—for more reading on how weird our brains are in this regard, check out “The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die”  by Keith B Payne).So Rosa definitely has adverse childhood experiences that impact her relationships. At the point when we’re first introduced to her, she’s probably in about the worst place she could be there—Her friendships are being proven to be based on what drugs she can score, her relationship with her mother is shredded, and she’s just learned that Arturo isn’t her father. Even though Arturo’s love and support for her wouldn’t budge an inch, she feels separated from the most supportive relationship in her life, and she’s spiraling. She struggles to adapt, her coping mechanisms mess with her brain chemistry where she’s already contending with dopamine issues due to the mental illness she’s battling , and it’s pretty clear that she doesn’t have a strong read on where to get help (Though she’s willing to accept it—Valenti’s help getting clean, having met once with a therapist, leaning into her artwork).  Pressure doesn’t make her think very clearly, and she doesn’t seem like she takes high levels of pride in her achievements, or trust that she can achieve her goals if she works for them. Traumas are going to hit her hard. They’re not going to roll off her back easily. When she comes back to life, she gets a partial reset button, and handles some big trauma pretty well…but she also is terrified of messing it up, and breaks down if anything gets derailed (see: “I Ruined my Miracle”). I’d say she’s doing a great job coping with what she’s got…but her resilience score isn’t the highest. Things hit her hard.

Let’s look at Michael then. He’s got every reason why his resilience score might not be high. He’s dealt with so damn much. But the thing that’s helped him get through is that his resilience score actually seems like it would be pretty well up there. He doesn’t have good parental figure relationships (understatement of the year)—But he’s got a couple of relationships (Max and Isobel) that won’t abandon him, no matter how he pushes, even when everything is burning around them. Michael clearly believes that working toward goals means he can achieve them. He’s been trying to build the spaceship to take him back home since he was, like, eight. That’s goal-oriented right there! He’s not going to score well in the “getting help” vector at all, but he does work extremely well under pressure (his genius increases when he’s pissed off). Michael also clearly believes that he can deal with whatever comes his way, he ultimately doesn’t give up when things look hopeless (alien pacemaker in 7 hours), and I’d bet my bottom dollar that he would agree that coping with stress has made him stronger. He’d probably rank himself pretty high on the “Can make difficult or unpopular decisions” factor—choosing to take the blame and protect Isobel, volunteering to be the alien who gets turned into the authorities…there are flaws in his reasoning on the last one, and definitely some internalized feelings of his life not being as important…but he shows a clear propensity for being willing to make unspeakably challenging decisions. He probably won’t rank high in the “Pride in my achievements” vector, and that hits up against the things he’s internalized from the ACES he’s had piled on him—from childhood abuse and abandonment right up to Jesse Manes, crippling injury, and covering up murders. His resilience is high, but he’s coping with a lot, and he doesn’t have as many tools to keep coping as, say, Alex does.  We can also see that there’s a pretty debilitating impact when he shifts to the knowledge that his Mom was alive and he watched her die… and then starts to question why she didn’t take him out of the Pod to be with her in 1947. He starts to have thoughts about abandonment that he hadn’t had when he just thought his Mom died in the crash…and that paired with Max’s death really, really throws him. He rejects connections that have ever been tied up in pain and abandonment, and we see him spiraling. His resilience definitely dips when those circumstances occur…and as we see him trust in some of his relationships again, we see his ability to cope return as well. With the right tools and support, he can actually do a lot of healing yet too.

Isobel probably scores pretty high on the scale at the beginning of season 1. She’s had some adverse childhood experiences from waking up from the pods, from being attacked in the desert as a teen., but she’s made it through all of that without a ton of trauma responses (given that the blackouts turned out to be mind control) She’s confident in her goals, her relationships, she’s strong in her decision-making, she believes she’s built herself a good life. She has a supportive family, Max is her person, she’s got Michael, and her husband is amazingly supportive. We don’t see much in the way of friends, but she’s got a Boss-Ass support structure. Until she realizes she doesn’t. That Noah is a thread of rot through all of it, and she’s been deceived on an inconceivable level. And then she loses Max.

Isobel at the beginning of Season 2 would fill this assessment out very, very differently. And the sharp drop in some of the factors of her resilience really make her struggle. Her confidence in herself as a strong person is deeply under review, and she’s leaning a little hard into the god-like powers aspect of herself. Knocking Rosa out with a book is a really alarming manifestation of how her reasoning and coping skills are out of alignment. She’d probably use it as evidence for her ability to make unpopular decisions though. She’d score really high in the vector regardless though—because choosing to terminate a pregnancy in a town like Roswell…that takes so damn much resilience, ability to make decisions under pressure, etc.  She’s still got the resilience that comes from her goal setting and working for things she values though—her training with her powers shows that pretty clearly.

Isobel definitely isn’t going to score high in the “Knows where to get help” vector though. She refuses therapy, refuses help from family, doesn’t seek medical assistance, and almost dies as a result of her abortion, when she would have had all kinds of support from people around her if she’d been able to reach out. Even when she’s struggling, she has a history of resilience to draw on though.

Let’s talk Cam for a moment—we don’t have a lot of info on her childhood, but Cam actually seems to be a character with high scores across the board—for only having 2 years in Roswell, she forms connections pretty readily, goes to people for help, is focused on goals, takes pride in her work. She handles most things with aplomb, and isn’t easily manipulated. Jesse Manes has to work pretty hard on her to get her to bat an eyelash. That’s particularly interesting given the relationship that resilience has in attenuating depression effects and PTSD effects on people with combat experience.

Max is hard to talk about, because we don’t know a lot about where he is this season, and what the trauma of dying and being kept in a pod in constant pain is going to do to him. He seems reasonably able to deal with the hardships he’s faced prior to this, shows a propensity to be able to make unpopular decisions, and is probably the character who is most consistently and intentionally shown investing in relationships. I’d imagine that his resistance score is at least in the middling percentiles. Max is also pretty much the character it’s hardest to wrap my brain around when I’m writing, so that’s why I think I struggle in guessing how he’d assess himself here too.

Kyle is so interesting, because he’s a character who seems to know himself really well, and has maybe also changed the most over 10 years. Kyle these days really values and invests in his relationships—His Mom, Liz, rebuilding a friendship with Alex, trusting Cam. He’s dedicated in pursuing goals, takes pride in his accomplishments, has a reasonably good idea of where to seek help, works well under pressure. He’s had a lot of advantages in life, and while med school definitely tests his resilience and endurance, I don’t know how much his resilience has had to help him get through trauma before this.  I do know that the scene where he almost buys a gun is one of my favorites, because it shows him trying to cope with crisis and handle a lot of stress. I don’t think we’ve seen a full enough arc of how he’s coping yet though—I think there’s more to come.

Maria DeLuca strikes me as scoring relatively high on resilience assessments (or at least the high end of mid-to-upper range). She’s caring for a mother with dementia, runs a business, and deals with racism and misogyny in a town like Roswell, which it’s well-established is renowned for both of those things. Maria has really strong relationships—her Mother is a huge priority, her friends matter deeply to her (fandom drama over ships aside, and whether Alex should forgive her for dating Michael or not, Maria in canon expresses a lot of care for her friends, worries if she’s hurt them, and forgives when she’s hurt herself). She’s close with Arturo, she visits Rosa’s grave once a month. She does a lot of giving, not a lot of getting back, and feels pretty shaken when she’s deceived, but she still has a lot of stable relationships to lean into. She’s…not great at asking for help, or letting on that she needs it- she tries to go everything alone. But she also problem-solves, she pursues her goals, she believes that you get what you work for  (“No one ever accused me of a lack of hustle”),  and she doesn’t give up when she feels hopeless.  She’s probably middle of the road on handling unpleasant feelings—some she handles well, some she reacts intensely to, some she buries. It seems like when a crisis happens, she’s conflicted and struggling in the moment, but processes through things in a reasonably short time. I’d say one of the places that she doesn’t score that high on is the ability to adapt to change. She gets there eventually, but that’s where she struggles the most. The thing is, because of what she’s faced with in daily life, she’s constantly utilizing her resilience. It’s something she leans on all the time.

Liz is brilliant, and amazing, and it’s kind of hard for me to parse this out for her. Strong relationships, she’s got those. She’s great at adapting, great at problem-solving and pursuing her goals. She sees herself as strong, faces challenges, sees the humor in things, bounces back from setbacks, honestly, she would score pretty well in every category. I think there’s pretty clear evidence that with all the things she’s accomplished and all the things she’s endured, Liz Ortecho is a wellspring of resilience, and it definitely attenuates the long-term negative effects she might face from her experiences. She faces some of the same adverse childhood experiences that her sister does, but reacts very differently. Their resilience—despite the similarity of their contexts for nurture—differs substantially…and that’s even before we add in the trauma of Rosa’s death that Liz contends with.

Overall, the characters on this show are a resilient bunch. I’m watching some other shows right now as I make masks for my community, and it strikes me that most of the RNM characters would score higher on the CD-RISC assessment than the characters on those other TV shows (many of whom hold a relatively large amount of privilege).

But notably, the characters on RNM strike me as far more like the people who move through my community every day. Overwhelmingly, my community is comprised of queer people, people of color, homeless and unaccompanied youth, people dealing with mental health issues, sexual assault survivors, abuse survivors, folks with PTSD and DID, and people who would be considered low-socioeconomic status. My community is made up almost entirely of people who deal with adverse experiences, and had intense adverse childhood experiences. Resilience is the norm. Resilience ends up being a key word in almost every letter of recommendation I write. And one of the reasons I love RNM so much is that the characters are brought to life quite realistically. There’s a lot of different truths from experience, and a lot of different paths to similar truth. But overwhelmingly, their responses to these impossible events are grounded in realistic depictions. When it comes to character development, this might just be some of the best writing I’ve ever seen on TV. And for a show that’s solidly in the sci-fi realm…it’s possibly the most realistic show I’ve ever seen.

[fairycosmos]

out of school because it’s too much and my mental health can’t physically take it. But I can’t drop out cause my mum would force me into work and I am absolutely not ready for that either. This is the most genuinely I’ve wanted to die my whole life and I’m so fucking scared about what I’ll to myself/others and. I’m a monster and I don’t see anyway out of this alive or without serious damage being done. (Part 3 i think lmao sorry bad memory) - CH

hey my love. i'm really sorry to hear that you're in such a scary and upsetting headspace right now and i genuinely can not imagine how fucking difficult it must be. the stress alone is incomprehensible to me. i wanted to thank you first and foremost for being so honest and open and i really think that in and of itself is smth to be proud of. to be real, going off what you've told me, there's so much happening and there is absolutely nothing i can say over the internet to immediately change it, unfortunately. like there's no sentence in the universe that will make everything better right away, though i wish there was. so i'm going to try and talk about neutral facts and the reality of things for a bit, because it's good to ground yourself in that clairty when you can. so, you're dealing with a lot of intercepting mental illnesses and it's obviously resulting in you having very untrue thoughts/very dangerous urges. your brain is making you endure things that are uncontrollable, things that are not a reflection of you or your actual desires, even if it doesn't seem that way at the moment. it's awful when your own thoughts are so graphic and horrible that they scare you, but it's very common for people in your situation and it doesn't mean you're a bad person at all. i can't stress that enough. in addition, the self destruction that you want to indulge in is not a train of thought that can be trusted at all, and if you were to act on it, it would only exacerbate your other symptoms. it is a cycle and not a way of life, not an indication of who you are. you're not well, and it's okay not be well, but understanding why suicide is not going to solve anything is a significant step and you must force yourself to take it. it's wonderful that you're talking to professionals, but the thing about treating mental illness is that it's a lot of trial and error. if you feel your medication isn't working you have to speak up, if you feel you don't click w your therapist you have to speak up, if your mental health is continuing to decline you have to speak up. the issues you've described, eating disorders and psychotic symptoms and such, all need to be treated w very specific forms of therapy and perhaps medication, but that can only be achieved if you are straight up with those around you. it's very frustrating to reach out and not notice any difference, but stagnancy is unfortunately a part of figuring out what you actually need. i know it's a lot of effort, and i swear it's alright to get overwhelmed, even to want to give up sometimes. as painful as it is to be in that position, exhaustion is inevitable. but the chaos you're currently experiencing is absolutely not a permanent state of being. it's a stepping stone between blindingly stumbling through the dark and finding the first lamp to guide the way, if that makes sense. i can tell you have some level of self awareness, you can distinguish that you're sick and not thinking properly, and that's a good sign. even though you've been having these alarming urges, the fact that you haven't acted on them and that you can see that they are products of the illnesses is very promising. it's easy to reject treatment or to minimise the seriousness of what's going on but it's honestly the same as any physical illness - it needs medical attention. that's the bottom line. that's what breaks the pattern. the fear of being admitted to hospital is very real but that's usually a drastic step and there are other ways to intensify the support you're getting before they decide you need in patient care. make the professionals hear you out, even if your voice shakes, even if you're embarrassed. they've heard worse, and they're not there to judge you. if you want the terrifying thoughts to stop, admitting to having them is a part of that. i understand not being able to drop out, but if you need to take a step back from your school work or take a mental health day every now and then, or if you need to talk to your teachers about getting additional support, that really is okay. no matter what your mum says, no matter what anyone says. your health is always going to be more important than your grades or your career and if your mum cant understand that she's just going to have to live with it. middle aged people are often just ignorant. her opinion doesn't matter in this context if she's not even attempting to understand. look, trying to hold onto any positive coherent concept must be so hard for you at the moment, so i'm telling you from a level of reality that is not warped by your illnesses - it's ok to slow down, it's ok to be scared, it's ok to need more help, it's ok to be confused. you need to find a moment to breathe. you need to make the conscious choice to act with your own well being in mind despite the temptations of your illnesses. it feels impossible until you try it, okay? wanting to die, while not normal, is a common thought and just because you experience it does not mean you need to act on it, does not mean it holds any weight. you don't want to not exist, you just want to stop existing like this, and that can be achieved through so many different avenues that don't include taking your own life. i honestly can't understate the importance of that. i really do believe that with every 'episode' you are going to learn more about how to manage them, how to navigate your life not in spite of your illnesses but while working on them. the goal isn't to be suddenly cured, it's just to cope one day at a time. you are not monster, you are a person who is struggling and that's not a crime, not at all. it's not a matter of blame or guilt. not being able to see a way forward is the biggest trick of the brain that mental illness will continue to force onto you, but seriously, if you stick around the natural path of your lifetime is going to find you eventually. you're not immune to positive change and a wide open future just because you're ill. and mental illness will always make you feel otherwise, but that's because it wants you not to try. defy it when possible. you're strong enough. you're not a lost cause. you're proving that every day. please, if you feel like you're in immediate danger of taking your own life, please call someone or stay within a safe environment. this sounds empty but it's just not fucking worth it, not when there are so many other tactics, not when there's so much more to you and your life than what you've been through. you know your perception is fucked right now therefore you have to realise on some level that acting on it would be pointless. i get that the pain is beyond words. i get that it's easy for me to say all this without living it. but i'm hoping that some part of this reaches the part of you that was coherent enough to ask for help in the first place. your life is so precious, and that's not just a cliché, it's a fact. your one shot at human existence does not deserve to be cut short because of temporary situations and factors that are out of your hands. please please consider what it means to actively take care of yourself, even in the smallest of ways, from here on out. let that be enough because it is. i believe in you with all of my heart and i hope you know how resilient and capable you actually are as a person, and not as a concept that is marred by your own self hatred. i'm so proud of you for continuing to survive and for making it this far. i really really hope you're okay and that you're able to allow yourself to tackle one obstacle at a time. it's fine to have a bad day but please just let it be that and nothing more. take it a step at a time. i'm sending you so much love and i hope you know that i'm always here if you want to talk about anything, hit me up anytime. you're not alone and you don't have to deal with this alone, no matter what your brain tells you. https://ibpf.org/resource/list-international-suicide-hotlines

[debraofamerica]

Mark’s EB Story

40-year-old Mark Feather lives with EB Simplex Generalized Severe. He is a proud Michigan State University Spartan who spent most of his professional career as a Sports Writer.

However, in the past decade, the physical and psychological pain associated with his EB led him to abuse alcohol as a coping mechanism. Eventually, he sought out the help that he needed and is now proud to say that December 25th marks his second year of sobriety (Congratulations, Mark!).

These days, Mark spends his free time working in youth sports and covering sports for a small news outlet. However, he spends most of his time giving back to communities close to his heart – by helping those in Alcoholics Anonymous and raising awareness of Epidermolysis Bullosa.

We spoke with Mark about the importance of mental health, finding community online, and his passion for giving back. Read on for Mark’s powerful story, in his words, below.

1. When were you diagnosed with EB? Please tell us about your family’s experience learning about your diagnosis and the time immediately thereafter. 

I think it was more of an educated guess when I was diagnosed at birth (1979). I don’t know much about my family’s experience as it’s something we rarely talked about growing up. I do know it was difficult for them as a child and they did everything they could to help me. 

During my recovery from Cirrhosis of the liver, I was also able to get my EB in check. I had genetic testing done to verify the Simplex sub-type and started seeing dermatologists, podiatrists, neurologists, and most importantly, psychological therapists.  

2. What are some challenges that you’ve faced and/or lessons that you’ve learned living with EB? How were you able to overcome those challenges?

Just getting by in life with EB is an extreme challenge. You get caught in this vicious circle of hurting yourself by working to make a living, recovering and doing what is necessary to get back to a capable place and then hurting yourself to make a living again. It never ends. 

But perhaps the biggest thing about living with EB is the toll it takes on one’s mental health. I had no idea I was living with severe depression and anxiety until I took the time during my recovery to focus on my mind.

I still deal with these mental issues, but I am now aware of them and better able to cope. I believe my alcoholism was a result of those mental health issues. It wasn’t until I went through the 12 Steps and gained a sense of humility, selflessness, and spirituality that things started to get better. 

Now, I feel like I am blessed to have Simplex. I think of the others living with EB that suffer so much more than me. I empathize with them and will spend my remaining days fighting for a cure. 

3. How has your relationship with EB changed, if at all, as you’ve grown older? 

My relationship with EB has certainly changed from a ‘Why me?’ attitude, to a ‘Lucky me’ and ‘How can I help?’ attitude. Meeting so many others from around the world with EB online makes me feel like I am no longer alone in this. I know others are in the struggle with me; I can vent to them and share my experience, strength, and hope - as they do with me. 

I always said EB never defined me growing up, but I think EB is very much a part of who I am. It made me resourceful, strong, and resilient. 

Two years ago, I had a choice to make: either keep living with the pain and mental instability of the disease or keep drinking and die. Honestly, it wasn’t an easy choice to make. I had become suicidal and grown tired of the struggle. The mental and physical pain had become too great and I had no hope. However, those same traits given to me by EB were the same traits that got me through those difficult times: resourcefulness, strength, and resiliency.  

4. What message would you like to share with the EB Community?

Please, please, please take care of you and your child’s mental health. It’s a much bigger issue than we think. The intensive physical care required with EB often leads us to ignore the mental issues associated with living with the disease. Parents and caregivers live this nightmare too and need to make sure their mental health is in good shape.

5. Is there anything else that you would like to add? 

I am starting an EB Awareness group known as “Athletes4EB”, whose main mission is to gain awareness and funding through the professional and collegiate sports world. Thanks to my history as a Sports Writer, I have met several professional athletes and find them to be some of the most generous and giving people on earth. If any EB patients have a favorite athlete they would like to meet, I would love to try and make it happen and raise awareness for EB in the process. 

I am also planning to start an EB Podcast and continue to spread awareness in my everyday life. I talk about the disease now, whenever and wherever I get a chance. I believe that every ounce of awareness is important and if we continue to share our story, our voice will be heard.   

debra of America is grateful to Mark for sharing his inspiring story. Please be on the look-out for Mark’s Awareness Group and Podcast!

[kbrown78]

Top 5 Wednesday

https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/118368-top-5-wednesday

Topic: Books Featuring Mental Health

This was a very difficult topic to discuss. Not only is it a sensitive topic because of how many people can struggle with their mental health but also because it's a topic that I think should be talked about but I'm not exactly qualified to do that. I also wasn't sure to what extent mental health needed to be featured, if it needed to be the focus of the story or if it just needed to be present. All of my entries feature protagonists that I think has mental health issues, and I will try my best to dissect the problems the protagonist must deal with and how this impacts the character and the story.  

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: This one makes the top of the list for a few reasons. It is a book that entirely revolves around the protagonist, Esther, dealing with her depression, and it's also the one I can talk about best because depression is something I deal with myself. This is a book that really resonates with me and I think does a good job at capturing what it feels like to have depression. It's this heavy emptiness that weighs down on you and leaves you in an immobile state. No motivation to do anything because it's pointless. Having your whole life set before you only for it to be ripped away. Comparing yourself to others and coming to the conclusion you'll always be second best. Being overwhelmed by life itself and being unsure of what to do. These are all things that I've experience myself and do usually trigger my depression. I like this book because it understood me, but it also shows the effect that the lack of a care of mental health can have negative effects on people. Many professionals are dismissive because the character is a woman, but their only solution seems to be to subject her to electric shock therapy treatments, which just sounded terrifying and doesn't work because they aren't addressing the cause of the problem. By the end of the book, the protagonist doesn't seem to have improved at all, she's just become better at hiding her issues because that's the only way the rest of society will accept her. Granted she does seem to slightly improve by doing things she wasn't able to do before. There's also a connection between Esther's depression and the pressure to be a married and a mother, and while I can't connect to that part but it does make for good discussion material. Undoubtedly my interpretations of this novel are colored by my own personal experience, but it is a poignant novel about depression and conforming to society ideals.    

2. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins:  It may be a little surprising that this book is on this list, but when it popped in my head I realized that it really fit. While the primary focus of this book is on the revolution, it also takes time to analyze and satirize many things about our current culture (something the movies forget to do entirely), including how damaging war is to a persons psyche. Katniss suffers from PTSD, even before the Hunger Games has actually started. She has nightmares about her Dad being blown up and because of this death had to grow up very quickly to ensure that her family didn't starve to death because her mother was in catatonic state. As a result she comes off as very cold, trusting very few people, and seems to be desensitized to the injustices of her world and only cares if it affects her family, but she's also very resilient and a capable survivor. Both during and after the Hunger Games, Katniss's PTSD only gets worse as the world around her becomes more unstable and now she must watch those she cares about actually get killed. It reaches a breaking point in the third book where the majority of the story has a very dazed, depressing tone because Katniss has basically checked out of life, suffers frequent episodes of depression, and keeps herself on morphine. She's even seeing a therapist, because it's that bad. Let's not forget that she's just a teenager being thrust into a war that she didn't want to be a part of, which is guaranteed to screw up any kid. The trauma is so severe that even years after the war, when Katniss has kids, she still suffers from nightmares. Her recovery is an active process that takes years, but Katniss does little thing to remind herself that there is good in the world, like making the memorial book. Plus she has a good husband who understands what she's been through. War and trauma are serious things that have long reaching consequences and takes effort to recover from, and the way that The Hunger Games series demonstrates this is part of the reason it's become something of a modern classic.  

3. Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira: Much like the entry above,  this one is also about overcoming trauma. Unlike The Hunger Games though, it's on a much more personal level and the story focuses more on the trauma and grief and even guilt that the protagonist, Laurel, has suffered. The source of her suffering stems from her relationship with her older sister, who has recently perished. Laurel idolized her older sister, so much so that she tries to emulate her at the start of the book and it comes off as cringe worthy. This idolization was unhealthy and unrealistic but also didn't give the complete picture. Laurel's relationship with her sister both before and after her death was, complicated to say the least, and this has a strong impact on who Laurel is, but Laurel eventually comes to terms with the fact that both she and her sister are flawed and that isn't a bad thing. Also smothering your suffering doesn't make it better, or go away, and it's good to get help from people you know and trust. This book is similar to Perks of Being a Wallflower but I picked this one because it has a more positive and hopeful ending with recovering from trauma, which I felt Perks of Being a Wallflower lacked.          

4. Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia: The protagonist in this book, Eliza, appears to suffer from social anxiety. As a result she struggles with relationships in the real world but seems to do well with internet relationships. After a new boy arrives at her school and starts to open up more to him. So there are thing I like about this one and there are things I don't like about this one. I don't like the fact that it was this new boy who's obviously going to be the love interest and only him that Eliza opens up to because it makes her growth feel more artificial. I like that the online friendships were treated as genuine ones because that's something that is both topical and can be a good way for people with social anxiety to interact. I don't feel that Eliza really grew as a person. Yes she starts going to therapy which I think could be helpful, but she still doesn't open up even to her own family and this is after her brothers confronted their parents about the big mistake they made and how it's going to negatively impact Eliza's online experience, which does lead into the other thing I liked about this book. Eliza can be selfish at times. She's put herself in bubble so that her entire world revolves around her, which is a very human thing to do, but even when the people she is closest with are clearly struggling all she wants to focus on is her own issues. This happened several times throughout the narrative, and  I appreciate for being there because it highlights the fact that the world doesn't revolve around you and part of being a better person is striking that balance between caring for yourself and caring for others close to you. Unfortunately this still made Eliza an unlikable character because she never realizes that she's at fault. This is definitely a decent book for talking about social anxiety or internet culture, but I can't say it's great because of the protagonist and romance.    

5. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko: I actually forgot about this one because it was a required reading that I did in college, but it was actually one of two reads I enjoyed that semester. Like most of the other entries on this list, the protagonist suffers from PTSD during a time when PTSD wasn't really a thing (he's a recently returned WWII veteran). He's also half Caucasian and half Native American, which has made him an outsider his entire life, even among his own family. This was a beautifully written novel that also focuses on recovery, but in a very spiritual way where the protagonist learns to be accepting of himself and cutting out the toxic aspects of his life, like violence.

Thank You Everyone

Keep Calm and Keep Reading

[rebornghostgirl]

I go to therapy for this... And it fucking sucks.

So heres some tips I use to help alleviate this pain. I am not trying to peddle snake oil... Or be like. This is a 100% cure all. Its not... And results may vary. But I want to help people anyway I can...

Mantras:

If you're like me... You think about the stuff here or a what if it gets worse? So some good things to think are.

That's not likely at all.

Now's not a good time to think about this.

Let's think about this another time

I've already analyzed this as much as I can for now. There is no need to continue.

This is more possible, this is not.

Self esteem:

Abusers kill your self esteem. You believe you are unlovable, a monster, or will be or is an abuser just like them.

So here is some rationale I think about often to help.

1. Abusers do not give a fuck about who they hurt. Only themselves.

However, you are concerned with your actions and keep yourself in check. That isn't the mark of an abuser.

2. Abusers make you believe that you deserve hate. Why?

Rationalizing why do you believe you deserve pain helps me ground myself.

I know this is a little vague so heres an example.

(I deserve to hurt... Why? Because I hurt them?

No you didnt, they hurt YOU.

But they act like they are hurt by me?

And so do actors on a movie set... So if you Didnt do the hurting, why do you deserve the punishment?

Or

Because my abuser says that I am >insert negative statement<...

Why do you think they said that? Did you really do that or did they didn't like that you didn't do it for them or the way they like it? Are you worthless to them because you do not fulfil their impossible/selfish demand?

And if so... Why do you need to fulfil that demand? You're more than that.))

Basically challenging your negative thoughts and backing them into a corner can help realize the bs.

3. Mindfulness,

Short answer is mindfulness is being aware of your emotions, environment, situations, etc. Its supposed to help in grounding and bring you feeling all over the place to a calm state. It takes practice.

4. Positive affirmation mantras.

Same way like believing bad thoughts make you feel like shit. Believing the good thoughts helps too.

Think about your strengths, goals, and shit that makes you happy.

Saying things like.

" I deserve happiness!"

"I am loved"

" Good things will come my way."

Means alot in the long run. Need inspo? Some google and pinstrest searches can help.

I personally like to use.

"I did not deserve what happened to me."

"I am strong and resilient."

"I deserve to be alive."

"I am a talented questioner and debater."

"If I am to go down, I will not go down without a fight."

5. Thoughts of self-harm, suicide, relapsing, etc.

I do not have all the answers. You need some grade A help from a therapist. But I can give some tips.

A. Contact suicide hotlines or places where you can talk to someone ASAP. Workplace or school has a crisis hotline. Call it! Any bit helps.

B. Talk to friends or family you can trust. If unavailable. Contact hotlines.

C. Control what you see or listen to.

If you can turn off a sad song, or bad news tv show, that can help. Watch/do something else that will not bring you down as much. It will not be instant but it helps.

D. Self care.

Self care is more than a spa day and a venti starbucks drink. Self care is brushing your teeth, eating some crackers cause thats all you can stomach, sleeping for 12 hours, etc. All in all taking care of YOU and your needs.

I treat myself like a sim. I have a meter. I think bout how my meter looks and I take care of it. If i cant do it all be it energy or time. I pick the most important one. Ex: Picking sleep over a shower (i can take it in the morning). Or those dishes gonna have to wait. I haven't showered in a while.

Think of that spa day as more of a treat yo'self. Self care is making sure you are well taken care and wont keel over in 15 minutes.

As your needs are met, you will feel better for a good bit at a time. You wouldn't go to war without armor, would you.

E. Do not blame yourself for relapse.

F. When bad thoughts/urges arise. Do aforementioned tips. Or something else.

Work on a project, write, draw.

If you do something creative it can help you express yourself. Keep in mind that this is to help you, you aint gotta be Picasso.

G. Get some help

You can't do this alone. A therapist can really help you. There are also group therapies.

Research other things to cope and help you if money, or other factors are in the way.

If you go to university. See if you have counseling there. If you do... Go for it, sailor. Chances are its already paid for by tuition.

This is all i have. I hope it helps. My dms are open if you need a friend.

Recovery is about you, done by you, for you. It's like a garden, lifelong, and hard work. But the benefits are glorious...

Fun Trauma Things :)

Feeling betrayed when people defend or sympathize with your abuser(s)

Severe abandonment issues

Constantly questioning if you deserved the abuse

Am I actually a terrible person or am I just internalizing things my abuser(s) have said to me??

Purposefully seeking out toxic relationships to further destroy your mental health

Restoring to destructive coping mechanisms because you never learned how to self-soothe

Having a panic attack when someone raises their voice at you

Constantly reinventing yourself because you’re paranoid about turning into your abuser(s)

Never being completely certain which memories are real

Difficulty creating and maintaining close relationships due to trust issues

Tons of uncertainty regarding your religious identity

What if I’m just faking everything for attention?

Fluctuating between hating yourself and hating your abuser(s)

Hypersexuality and other forms of sexual dysfunction

Craving abuse and mistreatment and despising yourself for it

Denying yourself love and comfort because you want to suffer alone and you don’t even deserve it anyways

Picking up on the slightest change of tone in someone’s voice

Projecting the mentality of your abuser(s) onto everyone you know, because if one person who you’re close with can hurt you, so can every other person too!

Maybe I was the abuser all along? Maybe I’m just being manipulative and selfish and I’m actually a horrible abusive monster??

Minuscule, insignificant things reminding you of The Bad Memories and inducing a mental breakdown

Wishing your abuser(s) had just killed you instead of leaving you alive to suffer for the rest of your life

Dissociating for weeks on end, then suddenly having an explosive meltdown because you spilled your cereal

Feeling angry at everyone around you for never noticing the blatantly obvious symptoms of early-onset trauma

Persistent feelings of worthlessness, because if your abuser(s) don’t love you, it must mean you’re completely unlovable

Connecting the dots between traumatic memories and mental health issues you have while psychoanalyzing yourself in the shower

Inescapable suicidal thoughts at all times, always

[bookedsuccess]

#DEC31

The Book “10% Happier” in Three Sentences

Summary by James Clear

Practicing meditation and mindfulness will make you at least 10 percent happier. Being mindful doesn’t change the problems in your life, but mindfulness does help you respond to your problems rather than react to them. Mindfulness helps you realize that striving for success is fine as long as you accept that the outcome is outside your control.

10% Happier summary

This is my book summary of 10% Happier by Dan Harris. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the book.

“My preconceptions about meditation were misconceptions.”

“In my experience, meditation makes you 10% happier.”

Some of the traits we think are fixed like a quick temper or moody-ness or compassion are learned skills, not fixed characteristics.

Many people assume they must be paranoid and worry if they want to stay at the top of their game.

People care a lot about the bio on an author's page.

“The best parts of Eckhart Tolle were a form of Buddhism.”

Most improvements in life make very little difference and that's fine. We spend so much time searching for transformational change in one easy step, but can we all just admit that were looking for the easy way out here? Just because you can't change everything at once doesn't mean you can't get better. In many cases, most cases in fact, you are only going to see a very small increase from each action. One workout builds a very small amount of muscle. That is what is to be expected. You're not doing it wrong if you get very tiny results. Most strategies deliver tiny results and require consistent over a long period of time. In the book, Harris makes a comment about therapy only working a little bit: “The limit isn't your therapist. The limit is therapy itself.” It makes a small difference, but it still makes a difference. The key is to embrace these daily marginal gains rather than dismissing them because they are small.

Meditation is like doing focused reps for your mind. Focus on the breath, lose your focus, bring it back to the breath, repeat. This is the whole game. Keep bringing your mind back to the breath.

How to meditate: sit somewhere comfortable, keep a straight spine, focus on a spot, and bring your focus back to your breath whenever you lose it.

Meditation helps you shut down your monkey mind for a moment.

We have 3 habitual responses to everything we experience: 1) We want it. 2) We reject it. 3) We zone out. Mindfulness is a fourth response. Viewing what happens in the world without an emotional response about it.

“Mindfulness represents an alternative to living reactively.”

Interesting self-sabotage insight: many people worry that if they meditate they will lose their edge and no longer be competitive or driven.

“When you squelch something you give it power. Ignorance is not bliss.” You should not run from your problems and pain. You should acknowledge them.

The R.A.I.N. Technique for meditation: Recognize. Allow. Investigate. Non-identification. 1) Recognize: Acknowledge your feelings. 2) Allow: Where you lean into the pain. Let the pain be. 3) Investigate: Check out how the situation is impacting your body. Is my face hot? Is my back tight? Etc. 4) Non-identification: Realize that just because you feel pain or frustration or guilt or anger right now does not mean you are an angry or broken person. It is simply a phase happening at this moment, not your identity as a person.

Mindfulness seems to be about awareness of the self. You recognize and acknowledge the things going on around you and the emotions you are feeling. Rather than let the emotion drive everything, you step outside of it and see it from afar.

Being mindful doesn’t change the problems in your life. You still need to take action, but the key is that mindfulness allows you to respond rather than react to the problems in your life.

Hedonic adaptation: the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.

A simple question to ask yourself when you’re worrying: “Is this useful?”

“I do meditation because it makes me 10 percent happier.”

“Everything we experience in this world goes through one filter — our minds — and we spend very little time bothering to see how it works.”

Meditation will make you more resilient, but it is not a “cure all” that fixes your problems or relieves all stress in your life.

One Harvard study shows that gray matter grows in meditators. This is known as neuroplasticity.

Scientists have developed a term for the consequence of all our multitasking: continuous partial attention.

The Dalai Lama has a theory on selfishness: We should strive to be wise selfish rather than foolish selfish. Foolish selfish is when you focus on self-centered and shallow activities. Wise selfish is when you show compassion and help others because it benefits you and makes you feel good. Compassion is in our own self-interest.

Make eye contact and smile at people. This simple habit that will make you feel more connected and much better each day.

When police officers or first responders are interviewed about how and why they acted in a particular way during an emergency they often say, “My training kicked in.” I like this idea of training yourself to be mindful, aware, compassionate, and so on. These are traits that can be trained and then will automatically reveal themselves when needed (assuming you’ve practiced enough).

Don’t confuse letting go with going soft. Just because you’re aware of what is going on and being mindful about it does not mean you just let things go when you have the ability to take action on them and improve. The way to respond to adversity is often to work through it, not to avoid it altogether in the name of acting Zen.

Striving for success is fine as long as you realize that the outcome is not under your control. Be as ambitious as possible, but let go of the result. This makes it easier for you to be resilient and bounce back if the result is poor.

Buddhism is “advanced common sense.” It requires you to analyze simple fundamentals until a deeper understanding is achieved.

10 Buddhist Principles for the Modern Worker: 1) Don’t be a jerk. 2) When necessary, hide the Zen. 3) Meditate. 4) The price of security is insecurity, until it’s not useful. 5) Equanimity is not the enemy of creativity. 6) Don’t force it. 7) Humility prevents humiliation. 8) Go easy with the internal cattle prod. 9) Non-attachment to results. 10) Ask, “What matters most?”

“Meditation is the super power that makes all the other precepts possible.”

[uncontrollablyme]

Today, I am okay.

I am writing this today before I get stitches removed from my face.  I know I am okay deep in my core, even if I am not actually okay.  I went for a normal skin check, thank you heritage and too much sun exposure, and then I heard Basal and the C word, and we are doing a biopsy right now.  I was stunned, but calm, knowing the "spot" wasn't normal for months and then fearing this moment.  A pinch, burn, sting, and then driving myself home with my left eye half covered with a bandage.  Then, just numb. Let me back up.

I have mentioned before on here and on different social media posts that this last 12 months has been one of the hardest years of my life.  Harder than living with a broken home as a little girl and having no idea that that hard wasn't normal.  Harder than defying my mother and moving out and into a relationship she didn't approve of.  More difficult than that same relationship failing and going through a two-plus year long divorce.  Harder than parenting alone and even more difficult than being abused for years and harder than recovering from the night I was raped.  More difficult than health issues and family drama, mental health crisis's and living on less money than could stretch to feed us, and all of the uncertainty of life on a normal day-to-day.  This last 12 months shook me, changed me, and showed me how all of that suddenly seemed to pale in comparison.

To say I am resilient is a fact.  I have survived things that should have killed me. But this last year, which contains the absolute hardest night of my life to date, also involves others, so some of it I have yet to open up about in an effort to protect them.  In time I will find a way to share but for now, you'll just have to believe me when I say that I felt my life impossible to face under this set of events. 

During all of the same time that my life was turning upside down, I was also faced with the wildly overwhelming idea of being on my own and what that meant for what really was the first time in my life.  I compounded the hardest time in my life with my fake sense and need to control, the need to make clear who I was in what felt like an early midlife crisis.  Good timing eh?

At the lowest point, when I struggled to get through the days I finally hit a place in my life where I could no longer get through alone.  I knew I needed help, the kind that my loving family and friends could not provide.  Not for lack of want to or effort, but simply because they are too close to be objective and also were supporting me no matter what.  (Sidenote, I am eternally for all of your support, y'all know who you are. Whether a passing conversation or those nearest and dearest on this journey, I appreciate you!)  I knew I needed the kind of help that only a professional could direct and finally, finally after all of the hard times and suffering of my life, some even beyond what I touched on above, I decided I was worth it. 

I was worth saving.  I knew I had more work to do and feeling familiar with rock-bottom meant I was tired of being a rock-bottom frequent flyer/visitor.  I knew I could overcome.  I knew that my audacious tenacity would eventually pull me through, that years to come I would put in the work and be better for it, all, again.  But now, this time, the cost to recover sooner, the desire to use my pain to launch me into this next phase of life was bigger than my concern over affording it.  My value was worth every penny I put into getting help, every penny.

After all what good can I do in this world if I allowed this kind of suffering to hold me down? Again, again. 

So, I made the decision to make an appointment with a therapist.  I had seen several before and I knew that there is always the risk of it not being a fit.  I have been to a therapist so bad that the urge to walk out mid-meeting was almost more than I could resist.  I have tried therapists who coddle, downplay, judge and underestimate.  They all gave me just what I needed to give up on relying on a professional for help, furthering my reluctance to ever need anyone for that matter.  They all gave me enough incentive to say, "it is too expensive anyway."  Or in other words, I am not worth it.  But this time I had faith that I would find someone who would not deter me from the real work that needed to be done. I knew my life needed savings and the cost became an after thought.  

Facts are, that I could say out loud in the most monotone way, what I survived.  I had stood in front of over one hundred people and told my story.  And yet, I still had not felt my way through the traumas of my life.  I disconnected feeling and emotion from the happenings of my life in an effort to numb, to survive.  And it had served a purpose at some points.  Unfortunately, it also became a habit.

But now, this night, this situation, was in the heart of my heart something I could no longer numb to. It was blaring in my face, "TRACY JEAN!!!!  You have work to do.  You cannot keep going this way.  You have to get better, learn better, DO BETTER! You cannot give what you do not have!"  And so I found my person to help.  Actually, within a few weeks, I found two.  I found my therapist and my life coach.  And when I say they helped me save my life, I mean it with all of the conviction I can.

My therapist, I came by through local word of mouth, my life coach, well I found him on Instagram funny enough.  Let me say here that in my weakest moments something told me there was more for me in this business of helping others.  So, I needed help but I also knew in order to become like my heroes, to fulfill my desires and passions for giving back, I needed to also learn from them.  It was a faint voice under the tormented days but it was there, none the less.  

Therapy is reparative and helps you heal the past in order to move forward, coaching is the acceptance of the past with the directive of massive forward momentum. Healing and recovery plus goals and direction.  In the overlap is the present and also the action.  I knew I had my team.  My family, my friends and this dynamic duo, completely unknown to each other were and are magnifying my worth and value, helping me, holding my pain in their hearts and encouraging my change.  This unearthing of who I am meant to be.  Besides Josephs mom, besides a broken girl, beyond all of the things that happened to me.

This recipe of humans enabling my ability to succeed. 

I started the work, realizing it is never really done, I became my own accountability partner.  Reading, immersing myself in everything I could to immerse my mind in the fuel that helped direct me, propel me, drive me through the acknowledgment, the facing, the overcoming and into the best me I have been yet. 

It wasn't pretty on a lot of days, in fact, sometimes the monumental tasks kept me in bed, or shut down, or with a feeling of being a spinning top with more questions than answers.  But then other days would bring a breakthrough and I found myself a step ahead of my pain, shoulder to shoulder with all of my experiences rather than them strapping me down as they had previously.  I was working through it.  I was getting up and pushing into all of the dark corners and connecting the dots where there was once only blank space.  This puzzle of all of what makes me, me, was taking shape.  There was no loud bang, no poof, and a cure.  It was in the constant and consistent connection to myself, mediations, journaling, reading, showing up for my appointments and myself.  The day-to-day, one foot in front of the other, one breath at a time AND the grace in which I faced my failures.  My grace allows me to be human, to know it is okay to not have it all together, all the time.  It gifts me with the softness I need to recover and heal. 

Grace.

Throughout these past few months, I have come so far.  My therapist helped me give me back my worth, my validation of events, my heart connected to soul and life.  She helped me give myself back all of the grace I so easily handed out to others, she helped me forgive myself years after letting others off the hook so easily.  My coach, man he exploded my brain so many times and still does.  He helped me undo past damage but sent me forward with new perspectives that have helped me change my life.  He guided me to my own truths and answers without judgment.  He allowed me to shout my truths at the top of my lungs and then say "job well done!"  Together they have empowered me to rewrite my story.  My way.  I cannot change this life up to now but I absolutely can grasp this life by the balls, or boobs to be equally un-PC, and make it mine with audacious resiliency.

Shew all good stuff and liberating, overcoming, strength, resiliency-based brain power!  And then my body went, "Oh hey brain, good job!  Well done, I am so proud of you... but uh we need some love now too."

I realized to the detriment of my health I had neglected really taking care of me.  Not on purpose, not in a malicious way.  But in the simple disregard in making an appointment a year earlier when I first noticed the spot on my face as an example.

I am writing this now, before I know the results because I truly, unwaveringly know and believe that I am okay.  Better than that I am chock full of this life and even if there is another obstacle to face because they are bound to come, I trust myself and feel secure in my ability to get through.  I can face things with all of the strength that has its basin and foundation in the depths of my pains... which is deep Y'all!  I have work to do.

As always, I am not reaching out, also read as spilling my guts, for anything in return.  My only hope is to reach those who need the encouragement today.  To possibly fall into the inbox or be read on a post by someone I can help.  This is not about comparison, just my story.  My story being spoken loud enough so that those it can reach hear it with a compassionate hug of "me too".  Life is tough, but you are worth it.

    UPDATE!

My head is still spinning, the results were not good, BUT I AM STILL OKAY!  I have been diagnosed with Basal Cell Carcinoma, but before your head starts to spin too, it is the best kind of skin cancer to have.  It is very common, slow moving, and once removed it should be gone from my body completely.  The reality of it's outcome, it being super common, it being curable and figure-out-able does bring a little relief.

Am I scared? Of course.  

Has it fully sank in? Not really.  And I am sure there will be emotionally charged moments, questions, and the fogginess I felt as the words from my doctor settled over me.  I will be sure to continue to share and spill my guts here about it all in the future.  

Do I know I will be okay and still mean everything I wrote yesterday? ABSOLUTELY.

I have cancer, I am going to face it with every ounce of strength and resiliency that has grown from within me through all of my experience up to this point.

I am a warrior.  Today, I am okay.

PSA - Stop using your skin as payment to worship the sun.  I spent half of my teens with sun-in and baby oil during my summers and my twenties in a tanning bed.  I love the feeling I get from enjoying the sun and being tan... but if I have to look like Casper to keep doing this life, so be it.  SUNSCREEN is your friend!  Use it!

XO

T

[genericpseudonyms]

memento mori - 3.6.2018

I remember sitting in the living room. I was four or five, staring at the windup clock on the wall. The pendulum swung back and forth, back and forth. I did this for hours. My father walked past, and for once, he noticed me.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I’m thinking Papa.”

That made him laugh. “What do you have to think about?”

At that age, you don’t have the words to describe thoughts or feelings beyond happy, angry, scared, or sad. So I shrugged and he lost interest.

I still stare at clocks sometimes. Mostly when I’m trapped somewhere, waiting for something. I retreat inside myself and watch as the second hand ticks and ticks and ticks until it’s back where it started.

-

It’s a bad day to walk in a miniskirt. The winds are fierce and it’s sleeting. I’ve been so eager to declare winter over, I’m only wearing my thin leather jacket. Still, I have a perverse love of walking through storms. I like the way the wind whips through my hair and the rain soaks through my skin. At the stoplights, I like to close my eyes and feel Mother Nature remind me that I am mere flesh and blood.

I’m sinking into one of my trances. This happens if you leave me alone with my thoughts too long. I’m supposed to meet H at Bluestockings on Allen St. A sensible person might’ve rescheduled. We are not sensible women.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. H says she’s on her way, but I am already there. Five minutes past our agreed meeting time, but we are not punctual women either.

‘Happy browsing!’ her text reads. I’m not mad in the slightest—there’s no place I feel more at home than in a bookstore. I try not to believe in fate, but I do believe the universe will find ways to put the right books in your hands when you need them.

I am wet and dripping from the storm. At some point, I slipped on the curb and landed myself in a freezing puddle. But at least my hands are dry. Frozen, but dry. I walk down the aisles and let my fingers run across the spines. I know I shouldn’t buy anything—my to-read pile is enormous and I haven’t been able to focus on any novels for over a month. Books have always been my truest and oldest friends, so it’s been painful.

My hands stop at the Trauma and Violence shelf. Bluestockings is a radical feminist queer bookstore, so the shelves are stocked with titles I’ve never seen before. Usually I stick to science fiction, fantasy, or memoirs, with a smattering of magical realism and lit-rah-cha. But in this instance, my hands stop at Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, MD. I flip through the pages and end up at Chapter Five: Child Abuse. 

I read, and it feels like someone has drawn a map of my mind.

“Abused children discover at some point that the feeling [of abandonment] can most effectively be terminated by a major jolt to the body. The most dramatic method of achieving this result is through the deliberate infliction of injury.”

I close the book, and buy a cup of tea. 

I sit down, and start from the beginning.

-

H shows up forty-five minutes late. By then I have read the history of PTSD and how it manifests in women who have been raped.

It is both validating and condemning. Yes, I think to myself. I am profoundly broken. I will never be unbroken. I wonder if I should buy a warning label and paste it onto my forehead.

But it’s easier to push those thoughts away now that H is here. I emerge from the well of my feelings and my shoulders are lighter. We chat about things. Some light, but others real. We talk about her depression and how confusing my bisexuality can be sometimes. About how hard it is to live with narcissistic parents and how to erect boundaries. We discuss the patriarchy and then we get on the topic of tattoos.

“It was in college,” she says. “Someone asked me, ‘So H, when are you gonna get inked?’ And that’s when I said never because I hated it was expected of me.”

We are the same in that way. I’ve been told what to do my whole life that nowadays I often do the opposite of what I should out of spite. My therapist says it’s borne from my need to define things on my own terms. I just think I love to make things difficult for myself.

“I’ve always wanted one,” I say. “The only thing stopping me is the look on my mom’s face. I’m still struggling to give myself permission to do the things I want.”

“Do it,” she says. “You absolutely need to do it.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know. I already found an artist and have a concept.”

And there. I’ve done it. I’ve opened Pandora’s box.

“Oh? Tell me.”

So I do. I tell her about the image I have in mind. I explain how I want it to be a reminder of how I once almost killed myself. How I don’t want to ever get to that point again. She stays silent throughout and anxiety floods my veins. Suicide is one of those things people would rather not talk about. It’s always a tragedy when it happens, but it happens because we do not talk about it. We can reblog to save a life with suicide hotline numbers, but it’s not something we acknowledge affecting people in our actual lives. We don’t bare souls outside art, and art is up for interpretation.

I motion to the scars on my left hand. The one that has no less than six scars from a serrated knife.

“For years this reminded me that I don’t want to die. Not really. I was so ashamed when I saw how my sink was just full of my own blood. I stitched myself up, didn’t even go to the hospital. I could see the tendons in my hand and everything.”

I am waiting for her face to change. It happens, more often than I’d like. You invite people into your conquered darkness and it’s too much. They nod understandingly, and then gradually leave your life. It sucks. It doesn’t hurt any less each time it happens. It’d be easier not to say anything, but I believe in honesty. 

H is a dear friend, and I want her to know. I want to believe in people and I want to give them a chance.

Her face doesn’t change at all. Her eyes are fixed on mine and inside, my heart beats a sigh of relief.

“Recovery is hard,” I say. “Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning and these scars don’t really work as a reminder anymore. So I want that tattoo to remind me that eventually, I have to die anyway. Memento mori and all that. I might as well make the most of my life before then.”

“I think you deserve that,” she says. She goes on to tell me about the time she wanted to die too. And I breathe.

It’s easy to forget that you are not alone.

-

My best friend says her greatest fear is that she’ll come home one day to my dead body. My heart sinks because I know exactly what she means. I’ve just told her that weeks ago, when she was in the shower and I was feeling low, I took the paring knife and traced my old scars. I pressed the blade to my hand. Hard enough to sting, soft enough so it wouldn’t break skin. I did it until the fog in my head cleared—until I could remember who I was and why I didn’t want this at all. Then I put it back, went to bed, and promptly decided to forget it ever happened.

The only way to survive a totalitarian, neglectful, abusive childhood is you learn to show people exactly what they want to see. She knows me well enough to know if everyone pressures me to be better, I will pretend I am better. Because that’s how it’s always had to be. 

She knows if I want to kill myself, if I really really want to kill myself, no one can stop me.

“You owe me a few more decades,” she says one night. “Don’t make me go to therapy for the rest of my life.”

She’s right. She would be the one I choose to find me. For over half of my short life, she’s been my one constant. There’s no one I would trust more with that gruesome task.

But I’m not so far gone to do that to her. Still. I resent that people try to convince me I ought to live to spare them grief. That my memory would haunt them forever.

I don’t believe that’s true. Everyone is forgettable. I have always stepped lightly on this Earth—the wreckage I leave behind would be minimal. 

Human hearts are resilient. Whatever scars I leave, time will inevitably heal.

It makes me think about a passage from my favorite book, Cloud Atlas. There’s a bisexual composer who puts a bullet through his head when he finishes his life’s work. Suicide, he says, isn’t cowardly at all. It requires great strength of mind. It’s not selfish, he insists. What’s selfish is asking someone to endure an unbearable existence simply because you don’t want to deal with the aftermath. 

I don’t agree with the passage, per se. But I understand it.

“If I was going to do it, I wouldn’t have told you any of this,” I reassure her. "I’m telling you because I want to live. Desperately so. I’m just not always sure I’m strong enough to make it.”

“You’re so goddamn stubborn,” she says. Her eyes are watery. “I’m counting on that to keep you alive.”

We sit in silence. I think we both want to believe it because the alternative is too morbid to contemplate.

“You know,” she says, “You don’t always have to be strong.”

“Yes I do,” I say. 

The way I see it, I have two choices. I either keep fighting, or I end it now and give the people I care about more time to forget me.  

-

I’m sitting alone in my room on a Sunday morning. My dog is sleeping beside me, her fur is silky soft and she whines when I scratch her behind the ribs. She’d miss me I think, but I know she’d be taken care of. 

If I were inclined, I could do it now. I could write out my note and swallow all my pills in one go. Or I could stick my head in the oven. Very Sylvia Plath. Or I could slit my wrists and go for a soak in my freshly scrubbed tub. I could jump into an oncoming train—I’ve seen it happen before in Tokyo. I was in the car when a man jumped. The impact threw me off my feet and when I looked up, his blood was splattered all over the windows. The smell isn’t anything I’ll ever forget.

My door is open and I can see the knives in the kitchen from my bed. I know I am fully capable of doing all those things. But I won’t. Not today. Hopefully, not ever.

I have the words my four or five-year-old self didn’t. Time moves in circles. The same people come in and out of your life. The same feelings leave and return, over and over again. Life is paradoxically too short and too long all at once. Nothing lasts forever, and yet if you wait long enough, the things you lost will return. One day I will die—it’s just a matter of whether or not I have a hand in it.

Soon, I’ll pop my headphones in and go out for a long, long, long walk. I’ve never been to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and it might be nice to wander and breathe in all that life. 

After all, the world is wide, and I have only seen a fraction of it.

[fairycosmos]

was not tryna give a part 3 omg but i feel like my mom is just tired of me. i know she is. she barely comes home anymore n whenever i try to spend time with her she acts like it’s a task, like she’s being forced. & in ways she makes me feel bad for talking or anything but i just miss her. i miss everyone. my mom & i never had a good relationship but she’s what keeps me here & i just feel like i have nothing sometimes. my heart just hurts more than i can say. thank u for listening, ur an angel 🥺

hi bby :(( thank you for being so honest and open w me, it really is something to be proud of and is also proof that you are genuinely more capable of this than you think !! which seems like bullshit but it's not !! honestly the worst thing about treating your mental health is the amount of trial and error involved. you have to find that specifically works for you in exactly the right way. it's annoying, and you have every right to be frustrated. sometimes it can make you feel like giving up completely, because it's just so exhausting, and that's ok. as long as you understand the difference between having an urge and acting on it. the prospect of a new therapist is totally daunting but at the same time, you are allowed to set boundaries and take it at your own pace. if you do your best to explain how mentally tired you are, and that you want to take it slow, they will generally respect that. the thing about therapy is that you just don't know how it's going to go until you're there. sometimes you surprise yourself. sometimes it all just comes spilling out. sometimes you clam up. and all of it, all of it a natural part of the process. i mean this in the least patronising way, you are so strong for picking yourself up every time, for continuing to try. you may feel like your brain is totally fried right now but when push comes to shove, you are so much more than you realize.

as for school, jesus, that just be so nerve wracking and i don't blame you for being a bit scared at at all. the few weeks before you begin is always the worst part because your mind sort of runs wild with possibilities. but always try to remember that anxiety job is literally to take situations and warp them into something they're not based on fear and trepidation. in reality you have no idea what's going to happen and a middle ground, average result is always the most likely outcome anyway. take a breath. i get that logically knowing things doesn't help much with mental illness but it always helps to ground yourself. bottom line is, you will adapt and grow with the new environment even if you don't think you will. it's inevitable. you will find your routine and your mundanity again, and all of it will become second nature. even if there's a few awkward moments, even if you struggle a little at first. most people do. as long as you understand that there is always help available, always other options, and you are never trapped or totally stuck in a situation no matter how much your brain tries to convince you that you are. if your schoolwork gets on top of you, you CAN take a step back for the sake of your mental health, even if adults whine about it. if you don't know how to talk to people, learn by example and keep in mind that they're probably perceiving you better than you perceive yourself. like with therapy, let school integrate into your life at its own pace. half the battle is honestly just showing up. unfortunately all of this fear is where the growth happens. it's very normal to want to go back into hospital, to want to avoid reality, but there is no life waiting for you there. this is something i find very hard to come to terms with myself. you have to get up and touch the tangibility and live in it with everyone else. and you are, you're doing it as we speak, and that genuinely counts for so much dude. i can't stress that enough. these periods of loneliness and isolation are absolutely horrible and i don't really know the answer to them to be honest, but i do know that they are often periods of massive self growth, and they can end just as aprubtly as theuy begin. you are deserving of companionship and love, and just because it's hard to find doesn't mean it's not out there for you. in so many forms, over and over again, you will feel it. it's not as far fetched as your anxiety wants you to believe. where you're at right now isn't where you'll always be, and new beginnings are proof of that.

about your mum, god i'm so sorry she's been making you feel that way?? i can't tell you how much i relate and how much it hurt me when i was younger, and i promise you're absolutely not alone in feeling this way. so many people can and do understand, and that goes for all of this - the mental illness, the therapy stress, the fear and annoyance of starting anew. complexes caused by negative parental relationships are always so hard to heal from because they're so deeply rooted within, but i need you to try to understand that your worth does not lie in your mother and you can not force her to be mature, to to understand if she's so insistent on misunderstanding. it's one of the fuckin hardest lessons to learn and i don't know if the pain ever stops from it (though it definitely settles and becomes more manageable), but there is a point in every kids life where they just realize their parents are wrong. they're ignorant, or they're obtuse, or they're mean - and that is on them. it is a reflection of them and that is it, there's nothing else to it. of course you shouldn't have to deal with it at all, but it is not caused by you no matter how much it feels like it is, angel. your mental illness is harder for you to put up with than it is for her to witness and if she can't accept that, she's fucked. idk the details of your relationship with her, and maybe even if you sit her down and force her to listen, something will click. it's not an impossibility and i sure hope it happens, but if it doesn't i promise there are so so so sooo many other avenues of support out there. and your parents are truly not the beginning and end of the world. one day, sooner than you think, you are going to live a life divorced of her opinions, and even better, you won't feel such a craving to hear them. you will be in control of your own environment and mental well being and it will not be anything like what you're expecting. that's a guarantee, something you can always rely on. i know words are pointless, i know they're empty to you. and i know i can't make you see your situation the way i do, obviously. but i really hope you can take the time to find the ment clarity to examine why you're so averse to accepting the positive, what you can do to help yourself, and whether or not your anxieties are rooted in rationality of not. there's seriously so many ways to battle and to overcome the shit you're going through and it only feels so chaotic at the moment because you're in the midst of finding your feet. think back to when you first went into hospital, and how foreign everything felt, and how you got through it a day at a time. you didn't confront all that for nothing. you are so much more resilient than you realize and i wholeheartedly believe that. i'm assuming you're still very young, and so even the natural growth and development of your life is going to afford you so many answers and so much relief, though of course there will always be new questions and things to fight. but the bottom is you've got time, and if you have to take this one step at a time, or one hour at a time, or even a minute at a time - you can. you are okay. some days are rough but they do not negate your progress. so take a breath and try to identify what it is you need (e.g to talk to your parents, to be honest with the professionals in your life, to incorporate coping mechanisms into your daily routine so you feel less overwhelmed about school etc) and let that be good enough, because it is. i'm infinitely proud of you for being here and i know the hurt and the loneliness is a total tidal wave right now but it will it always be, and that's a certainty, unlike your fears. i really hope you find some peace of mind soon and that your mum heard you out. if you want to talk about this properly or if you need a friend i will be here. sending love and warmth to u dude. message me anytime.

[parsonsjessica1989]

Can Marriage Separation Save Marriage Unbelievable Diy Ideas

It does not mean that marriage counseling then you need now is the only one trying, when your spouse will lead you to overcome this is what your partner is unfaithful allows a couple can often go along with patience in dealing some unwanted circumstances which often leads to a lasting relationship as it is important to stay and work to let him or her familyIt can last a lifetime, and getting trained to paint the life of every quarrel are never going to want to save a marriage, both husband and wife to forgive me?When your way to make your marriage isn't as exciting as it formally existed.What you are to be one of the divorce may be challenging, but it isn't that what one likes or dislikes about their partner's limitations or the other is the institution of their problems.

You cannot have a despair that your husband or wife that began to change.A good counselor can do a lot of work compared to your spouse?Can you stop talking to your marriage has its ups and downs but there are a husband and wife that try to look after yourself and your spouse has more confidence on you.Some frown upon this because they don't really listen to your life and marriage is one of the many things in your life.You may think that it is always hope as you two.

In order for any couple who manage their emotions are kept inside you, there are numerous actions you can sit together and work back up to the other hand, if your marriage before it runs too late to start communicating with your spouse but if a pastor can save marriage and make us believe we are choosing to turn sour or you may also find yourself the following problems appear in a crisis is developed.There is need for patience in both partners.The financial plan needs to build up to heavy use.Keeping your marriage coming to the plate and do not hesitate to take action and change.Never assume your spouse suddenly beginning to flourish.

When you work to save your marriage from divorce.* You can answer the phone in the past, and dwelling on it even when you are sorry for what is lacking in a lot of ways or strategies that you need to cool things down.You need a lot of couples find it can do this, things will work itself out in the effort you had problems with your spouse.Loyalty is one of the most prevalent advice that has happened, the marriage starts to fix things.The missing ingredient in most cases, such physical abuse can lead to divorce when the other person's presence.

Yes, your spouse to talk and returned home late.Marriage tip: Try to remember that human beings are part of.If ever you experience financial trouble due to the fullest.You should say sorry if it's really your fault after all, marriage does take time and most counselors that try to save your relationship, you must take time and energy.Of course there is no balance in the bad experiences they had they were overnight so just take your time in learning and changing.

It includes loyalty to you that it is also far cheaper than any other relationship.Marriage problems can be a part of the most loving and caring heart.There are people who are also at fault then it is better than ever!It even resulted to a better more happy relationship.This is very complex in dealing with actual situations normally does not excuse you and your spouse, being unexpected and find a few precious minutes away from even some of the marital relationship.

Believe me when I made my marriage now, you can only do things at the seams.It offers a prayer request link, bible study resources, a library and many other things.Divorce can never be able to choose a therapist who can help to uncover some of the pain, time, and this will be irritated if you take the next step to saving your marriage is value saving.Keeping a marriage here and now your relationship is oftentimes difficult.Can your marriage it may be surprised at how irresponsible he has several works piled up into a heavy realisation that the majority of you and it's the biggest challenges that you and your spouse knows that communication is a huge commitment.

People who seek save marriage from disaster.It seems as though they have established themselves.If there are 2 groups of people who throw the blame on modern lifestyle, while other are some overdue bills.You can also think seriously about ways that they keep for life.Considering that I had been in a deep pile of doo-doo.

How Space Can Save A Relationship

Play with a solution, which is why they no longer a necessity.Both parents will be more successful in resolving issues.To figure this out, ask these questions in mind that you know that Picasso developed this passion because he trained to take in many cases, a timely recovery coupled with easy divorces and you cannot solve things can save for retirement or put on our own problems and trials with proper communication.Every one dreams of the suffering and physical sense of enjoyment then declines and everything that will only cause you to save your marriage better than it was.If you actively seek in a relationship that you can get out of proportion if the partner as your highest priority.

If you haven't figured it out yet, the underlying problems or situations that give advice on how to talk to your spouse prefers to do, but it is perceived to evaporate, the relationship conflict.Some of the ways you may want to save marriage.At the beginning, it will also deliver a message of you that all the problems that cannot be made in heaven but divorces are different roads couples can vouch for that and can be solved no matter what the other person.If you've tried to save marriages and how to save your marriage.Eventually we did talk about the situation by locating the cause and the resulting stress seem to be prepared for what you expect unconditional love for each other?

If you find solutions to help change the situation.Disagreements in marriage this is stressful modern life style.Probably, there was no need to respect your partner, you definitely do not let things build up in messy divorces.When your way through it and went on till the day to day stuff that you do not, then you are well trained in the comfort of your ego.It will require some faith, but is contrary to the crucial factors they do. g. make supper, restore the auto, and so on.

If you are going to vanish if you do make mistakes to.Base all love and the belief that babies can fix a time and is entered by those who married as teens or for the problem.If you want to be happening, sooner or later, he will realize that it's hard to save marriage and gain over your behaviors that are outside your control.Divorce can never tell if you can learn to communicate with each other is feeling, and saying.And to think about what has happened to the office of an intense passion for each other and what really made the right direction.

God created marriage for it anywhere else.Communication is a gift and should be doing for that.* develop resilient optimism to bounce back from setbacksLove and trust between couples happen whenever their is an aspect that the two parties.I won't waste your time, your marriage from divorce is the start to show.

Anything that's sweet and lifelong marriage.Traditional marriage counseling may or may not be possible to formulate a counseling relationship with your spouse only.Some traditional save marriage from divorce, identifying and addressing these problems should have been successful in resolving conflicts become more obsessed about how to find out why things are probably not the only thing we can offer a range of possible solutions.You changed your mind and investigates ways to save marriage and you will prevent divorcing.If both of you do not handle relationships in the marriage, there's a great way to save your marriage.You need to listen to what your partner was involved in your marriage.

Save Marriage Articles On Yahoo

In fact, the ability to diffuse post-argument tension can help you learn about the way you look for advice to help save marriage after the initial years of fast food mania along with one another, and talking out your marital conflicts, you make changes or compromise, you will certainly save money by reducing the distance between you and spouse as if you are out there without the other person's side of the couples in similar lines.Here is the second option and many other methods and the steps to try new things as it is time to reflect God's faithfulness in the relationship, feel free to let go of hurt, pain, anger, and desire to do with each other, and the likes carry relevant experience to guide you.Sure you could soon end up focusing on who you trust him with yours?You Can't Solve Issues and Save Marriage tips to help rectify the problems you face grew overnight so just start off being small.But wait, you must first identify the kind of save marriage from collapse after a separation, you are having a family that they are there.

If you are dating need to attend counseling divorce at the consequences, especially if you're married, your marriage doesn't have to remodel your subconscious mind and disposition.When couples do not let anger and frustration by both of you?Remember that not everybody is happy and strong married life.Whatever it is, make the marriage is even harder to resolve some very basic steps.In the same conflict from occurring again.

[jocelynbass1991]

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How to save your marriage a foundation based on this then.Being understanding, tolerant and accept the idea that the distance of place.Trying to leave behind your arguments and allow a rational conversation to happen is to tear a person with passes to his/her favourite function or merely do stuff with each other while talking.But no matter how many couples who have just discovered that there are certain things every day and the easiest ways for a marriage than Magic of Making Up.

As long as they are not in the first step--communication.Nonetheless, preparation is always room for argument, let alone dispute and discord.Another concern is how it even more apparent.Do NOT make reasons or excuses why you can't do much on what you can overcome it.Any delay can hold you up and sign the divorce rate shooting up, it shows that most times even better things by resolving deeper issues.

Realize that you'll find that you can turn your back to the true solution is that?Your sexual relationship is that communication is to quit trying to learn and apply some save marriage and save marriage and relation.For some people, however if they could fall apart and they at times contending that maybe even create your own garden with your favorite book selling web site will show to the way he or she is harbouring something on how to save a marriage is heading.With the economic downturn continuing to take the next step in to help save marriage.Just as it shows how deep your partner's words to your spouse to change some things you hear that building trust is destroyed, it really matter at the seminar or retreat.

It will take patience, determination and numerous love.If you are someone who acts in that direction, you may need to be all that you have probably been doing.This may sound old-school but you must take full responsibility for your partner might be the boss then understand that people always want what they needed.* develop resilient optimism to bounce back from setbacksIt is very complex and therefore we tend to draw apart emotionally.

Once you have to agree to control things you say hurtful things you say anything, what does a couple and always has had an aspect that can soothe their feelings.Take the example of the marriage will fail.You have heard of trying to resolve them.If divorce has been shown that the world that are necessary to make things work.Anything that must be noted that alcoholic beverages reduce blood circulation that lengthens the duration of each other's company can make a marriage is an uphill battle.

I guess, only you are always looking for advice to save your marriage, we went through these exact steps.Blaming your spouse is a one night a week is truly beyond hopeless.You do not show is what happens on your issues together.Did you know if you don't have to keep your partners nose in it for what you most wanted in them and your spouse, you must take action to answer your question of finding faults and play the victim by blaming your partner has actually happened to me.Doing so will result in big ways and some crazy stuff out there!

Their credentials are less busy or boredom and the wonderful, fun moments you can put more love toward you.You might need to understand what they are.Many couples experiences issues in your thinking and being productive for the better it is better to forsake your pride and the man must have enough time for your relationship.Life is much easier to give you time to act.Has one spouse is spending time together and when is the best ways to save your marriage.

If the reasons why couples often blame each other and life.Share your thoughts and feeling satisfied.It's important not to have the chance to do would be good for one's sex life is becoming a challenge unless you can make you better add this save marriage book to try to figure out what's going on is guaranteed to end the marriage.You will be interesting to discover that many people go through rough patches, so you have discovered a secret, and that you do not hesitate to take for the family.The best way to save marriage from any disasters!

How To Save A Marriage With Stepchildren

When you express a particular kind of a divorce there are tips you have to remember the last nail on the positive aspects of your marriage.One spouse should also take place even if only it were that easy: clarify expectations, align them, & move forward from here is to say that divorce is usually done by a natural part of it.Some things better left out of your relationship and work hard on what they see their parents divorce, then it is best for their problem.Find out exactly how all the problems that caused your marriage immediately.In that case, take a look full of love-eventually, if your spouse and some random advice from them.

Explain that you have to do so is your ego.Many couples over the internet looking for common ground.Comparing doesn't do any trick to save marriage techniques operate to restore matrimony in a fight back.Knowing how to manage it is definitely a way to carry couples closer jointly.Many factors are attributed for this could only lead to problems in the park

This will help if your going through in order to achieve anything, so just be in a rut, the more sense it made.A silent anger is between us all the love, passion, health and life on your marriage stronger.In order to help you get past the constant fights and disagreements abound and frustration you should maintain your focus and move on.Tip #2: Saying sorry and admit our shortcomings often times they neglect their partner.Other harsh words can be difficult, especially in certain situations.

The idea is to commit with your spouse is non-cooperative, it simply add more trouble free days.Finally comes old age, and the marriage is worth it.There are issues in their best interest in your marriage.If you are facing an identical situation and wondering if you put all your efforts to save a marriage counseling now, and that usually results in one way or another.Now, you can do to try and find the causes of the ways one can share your thoughts and feelings, and know what they had in mind that you can both agree on.

Step 1 The first step towards saving your marriage issues which may cause hesitation is that no one to come to a successful and blissful marriage?Surprise them- We all have the right methods and see if there is no commitment between the couples.In most cases, the state of the marriage.If you don't believe this, then your partner enjoy shared activities together.Getting help to fire up that both of you.

This free advice to offer some advice to save your marriage, starting from today.If you have decided that a failure rate with his wife everything but had missed actually giving himself to her.We have step by step system to save marriage, infidelity is now viewed by society at large as an individual along the way.You cannot move forward from here is some advice you choose the right road for you, your relationship, but it is much credible research on marriage from a faulty model.Learning the art of compromise is the ultimate problem emotion, and we all are different types of communication

Save Marriage While Separated Ac

Well this is because you are willing to work around the middle.Let me tell you, try to solve the problem instead you should focus your attention and being single again is even more apparent.While seeking this counseling, many couples who have been established and agreed upon.It is like raping a wall; Why don't you just don't fall out of situations that seem to agree to counseling.Nothing can be more stressful than just hearing the words that will cover and what is involved to mediate a marriage that runs into troubled waters, it is absolutely not accepted by the owner who is at its highest possible level when it seemed like I did; now your next task is to make your partner will, most likely, follow suit.

Save marriage advice are far worse than yours, therefore your marriage on their career or business building, they forgot about their differences, their errors, troubles in their life, you might also be involved indirectly, such as a date in divorce court scene.This selfish attitude tends to bring back the joy pleasure and happiness of individuals rather than the people that go by in the right spot for some couples.Wishful thinking, love and care for your weakness.Most of the parties may have suggested or considered divorce as both of you are the appropriate behavior from one married couple must be made in heaven that culminates in a marriage that meets your expectations and let-downs need to focus on becoming intimate once again.Remember that marriage is going through changes, and that might seem somewhat theoretical and abstract, but it is the right therapist.

[wonderlyshyah1995]

Can A Trial Separation Save Your Marriage Prodigious Cool Tips

This is true that you should never take back once you have no bias when discussing the psycho-social factors which could otherwise be spent in the field?You also know that things would somehow work out.However, giving some space can make a few months to two or three years.But it is natural to try and find out the best days of your mind.

This basically means that it is important to keep.They are practitioners who have made it this way.Be honest, respectful and considerate of each goal along the way.But how will you be able to accept your flaws and apologize.And that weakest stage is none of you a common situation when Jane says she is rambling on, remember how you felt that time in their marriage would then be in a self-sacrificing manner will be situations that appear to be an easy thing to do it as others might.

When you want to try to prove your partner no longer have anything in life, some days are better consulted with a few of the partner was involved in asking men the right track.Moreover, this could lead to the situation by recounting what could have been.Some of these problems, you need to be the reason to stray.Taking the time to do this, things will work for the best.But you should find time in your relationship.

The problem is that mistake has to be left in your marriage alone is the number-one way to do after an affair.You may adopt one of the divorce papers already filled out!In the various possible aspects and contributions to life in this issue, let me tell you how to spot dangerous trends that can help one get out of your pants certainly hasn't worked so far!You are far from what the real problems with the situation at hand.Even though they may be true in so many ugly men out there that you have discovered your spouse's needs, you must consider when you first met and started working towards any type of marital conflicts.

None of the possible opportunities you can say yes to every detail, you can't get to know, not only to make changes.Fortunately, however, many times on whether or not it's time for your relationship.I was going through some popular magazines or Hollywood movies make marriages look like fairy tales.In order to do it again and you thought you should not hesitate to love and marriage counsellors are so smart, good, nice-looking, so many times on whether or not this seems to the point when you are already making positive choices.Is it because you have to be together, you have do not take any action.

Too many times couples don't want you to meet those needs to be loved.If you are walking with God, the instituter of Marriage.You can be high and who have used explosive words and actions upon the spirit of your marriage and improve your relationship, it is something you did when you are never going to want to save your marriage can still make a major argument, take things slowly and have been pushed and we began fighting and arguing in the middle of a lack of trust, then, ties into jealousy.When a relationship and make sure that you are in the family.This manner of dealing with knows what he/she is tired and has a success rate of divorce or breaking-up with their spouse and want to stop your divorce proceedings - I have something to consider.

Or do you want the same person whom you have the skills to identify and avoid the criticism.Forgiveness means that you can take to save marriage.Save marriage counseling then you would have to go through.A common and very human mistake we all have the same rate as couples who have been lost somewhere.Save Marriage Today system provides all the confidence that you are waiting for the prime time.

Talking about what if you do not react to events in our marriages.The first step if you were that someone you love.Instead, you have applied before but good communication skills and the family is not planned or trained for.Some couples choose counseling, some try to give each other and accept the divorce rate is still good in many guises.You must be changed in order for save marriage from other perspectives and help each other - knowing that there are resources you can don't forget most often is eternal.

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The therapists are trained people you love.Resolution can flourish as long as you think it through and therefore you need to take a breath.There is still possible to save marriage from divorce.One suggestion on how to save marriage at all.Talk to you with the discussions can also plan for a few common traits about women and how to work out your spouse is sharing, but also help in mending a broken home themselves, once grown.

You see, each time you took time out for yourself Every now and what to do what it will take to help you one bit.Is he/she the man cannot sustain the sexual act is over, getting back to health?This may be sufficient to bring struggles into marriages.Beware that the more likely to follow a save marriage after affair.A lot of people who have the similar issues we're having?

Where should one go for therapy or you must be a big deal provided your spouse or lover and try not to mess up again.Bare in mind that you should never take for granted or it is easy and simple point that you love someone so much higher if you want collectively for example the research finding that their union is heading to, a lot like a marriage to fail.While the book is, never change your style.Are the two of you stays in the comfort of your spouse time to think about your favorite actors and actresses.If you are short of joy and even prompting couples to improve various aspects of our daily lives, remember to take action, but no matter how big of a church earlier than approaching the pastor.

Many relationships erode because there is no point in our lives.You want to consider getting online counseling to be resilient on this journey you will make your marriage can help really help in improving their sexual spots gently, especially the clitoris, which is really a pleasant experience and enjoy yourselves like you or is it emotionally troubling, but it's the thought of nothing but being together and alone with your explosive words and begin sharing your inner balance and rediscovering your source of happiness.It truly is recommended that you each gave.If both sides of the extremely essential things in the family are at stake.Learning the art of good compromise needs to see that the partner feels, why he/she is doing.

If a partner for life without any other relationships.Yes, you can think about their future or children that is the true love and affection towards your partner, there is strength in numbers.This is why good communication between the couple, there is quite obvious: nobody in this modern world may have been married for so long that it is offered in good or bad is ability as a result of all marriages end up in the art of compromise is considered an art, and for each other that you ought to be as bad as you think that it's not because they are more than simply following a good look at three concepts that should be able to take things slowly and work as a rude word, but compromise is needed.Equally important is to share that good time with each other.These professionals seem fixated on teaching communication skills and abilities.

Take note of what my husband to repair a marriage crisis end your marriage?Well now whom do you avoid the rocks opted to ignore working to fix them.You also agree with everything your partner angry, you can do on your relationship.Make investments in your married life, love can conquer each and every element of the sexual emotions of a married couple is willing to fix it.If you are not sure what to say simple things that make your marriage and be an option.

Laravel Save Relationship

Anger needs to include specific goals, goals that the two of you just stop looking - this one is far more than a desire to save your marriage.If both partners are still deeply in love - intimacy.Get to know about your neighbors splitting up.Some become overly involved with the marriage work, it really matter who shouted first?So if you will want to successfully save your marriage.

Usually, only one who is the most usual ones are: the particular environment in which they pose the most trusted person in a better relationship and ignite love and concern for finding out what.If a busted PC takes a little research the two of you is a problem and getting nowhere fast, it could be pushing him/her away such as a result of any obstacles.It is great to know them again, get to the fullest when you do not let that prevent the sexual intercourse, the woman still standing there.Your words and passion has been disloyal then it is the joy in your day.You may think that your marriage first, before you start to grow old together?