coping

Mental Health Monday – Let’s Make a Coping Skills Toolbox

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I wasn’t able to post while I was out of town on my family emergency, but this gives me the opportunity to remind everyone that suicidal thoughts can come at any time, and having our resources and coping mechanisms in place constantly is a must for those suffering and recovering from them.

Suicidal Awareness and Prevention is an ongoing struggle and our bad days don’t neatly fall within the prescribed awareness month.

We still need to do self check ups and check up on our friends and family who we know are at risk.

Even though this is October, here is the link to a graphic that I found helpful. Original sourcing is included at the link.

REPOST: Coping Skills Toolbox

Rec – Mental Health Resources

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First and foremost, if you are in immediate danger to yourself or others, call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255

After my best friend, this was the second number in my speed dial directly after my diagnosis. My doctor told me that the medicine would help, but first, I would feel better about suicide and to be sure to have that number handy. Depression is a scary place, but it is much less scary in the light, and diagnosed and treated than hidden away or hiding from it.

Second, I think that these resources can be used successfully by all varieties of mental illness and mental health issues. We are all individuals and react differently to different stimulus. Try it, and if you don’t like it, try something else. You will find the support you need.

Some of the other resources/strategies I’ve found helpful:

1. I found wandering into church a good place to sit and contemplate. You don’t have to be a Christian to do this by the way. I knew, but it was confirmed the first several times I went during an off-hour that no one will bother you. No one will interrupt your contemplation, meditation, prayer. No one will ask you to leave and no one will ask you why you are there. It gave me a place to go when I had nowhere to go just to be, and to think.

2. Be alone in a crowd. I’ve recommended Starbucks before, and for a $2 cup of coffee you can sit and sip as long as you like in most places.

3. My Resource List (link here and on the left). There are phone numbers for depression hotlines, suicide prevention, grief support, and I hope to add more websites. Please comment with those that have helped you, and I can add them to my list. Currently, it’s exclusive to the US, but if my readers are from elsewhere in the world and want to share their resources, I will be glad to add them.

4. I get a lot out of writing therapy. It’s not necessarily a diary or journal, but all kinds of writing makes me feel alive. Is there something that you love to do? Try it again.

5. Later on this afternoon, I’ll be posting a Coping Skills Toolbox that I found online. This is an excellent resource and a positive thing you can do to help for those rough patches.

 

Good luck and my best to all of you.

 

Inspirational – Christopher Reeve

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Ten years ago today, I was having labor pains at St. Peter’s Hospital. The television was on. Christopher Reeve died on this day a decade ago, my middle son was born in two days and my Mom died in fifty-seven.

That year began an unconscious depression that usually lasts from October 12th until December 8th. It’s a hovering cloud of darkness that overshadows everything else. It took me a long time to go from this is the first Christmas without my mother and my son’s first Christmas to this is my son’s first whatever. I’m not sure it left at all that first year.

I hadn’t realized the depression that I was in. Rampant mood swings, emotional outbursts of all kinds, hysterics, but somehow I managed to take care of my two boys. Of course, my husband helped, but there was no help for me. What was happening to me was that the dam broke and mental issues that have plagued me since childhood burst through. I wouldn’t know this until eight years later when things came to a head and I was finally diagnosed.

There literally is a rock bottom and I was down in it. There wasn’t always understanding but without the support and reassurances from a good friend, I don’t think I’d be here today. I got medical treatment and professional therapy as well as being hyperaware of what was going on in my head and with my body.

I don’t think you can say that there’s a cure for depression; nor many of the other mental ailments that are invisible but that thousands of people live with daily. For me there are constant checks and balances, awareness and coping tools that sometimes include hiding out and often include writing, an amazing positive for my mental health and in my life.

Next week, I plan on sharing some of these coping tools as well as others’ coping mechanisms. I find that a wide range of means of managing the unprompted reactions to each of our own mental illnesses gives us strategies for getting through those rough patches that often seem rougher when we have no control over them.

These tools give us that control, even if sometimes it tells us, stay in bed for an extra ten minutes or get up and eat breakfast and get a dose of energy.

Sometimes it takes a combination of things to get us into a beneficial place, and that place can last one day or a week or more. Or less, which is why it is good to have another strategy ready to try out.

On this tenth anniversary, I’ll share Christopher Reeve’s quotation from Wednesday because it really gave me valuable insight into never giving up. We can slow down for whatever causes that slow down, but never give up. That road will still be there when you’re ready to take that next step, and that will that he’s talking about doesn’t always come from a deep, inner place, but sometimes we need our strategies to get us to that place where we do summon the will. It’s different for each of us.

“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbably, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.”

 

Dana and Christopher Reeve

Dana and Christopher Reeve

Rec

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Today’s recs were going to be LGBT resources. With National Coming Out Day on Saturday, I thought that might be helpful, but in reading Jesus: A Pilgrimage and in re-watching the tenth season premiere of Supernatural, unbidden, I thought of what helps me through the sullen moments of my depression, and realized that I wanted to offer some of my go-to places.

My top three, not including supportive friends (I just received a card from my godmother that was the perfect sentiment at the perfect time, and later on today, I’m planning a phone call to my best friend):

1. I will read the day’s Scripture readings. For non-religious people, I would recommend Robert Fulghum‘s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten and his other books. Another book that doesn’t rely on a particular religion is John Harricharan‘s Under the Tamarind Tree – A Secret Journey Into Our Souls: Inspirational Quotes About Life, A Reminder of the Inner Magic. I would randomly pick a page and read it. This book works very well for that kind of inspirational reading.

2. Starbucks or Cracker Barrel. You can get away with sitting there for a long time for very little money. In the case of Cracker Barrel, I have found that their lack of wi-fi and abundance of white noise lets me get a lot of writing done with very little distraction as well as abundant refills of fountain drinks. If you frequent Starbucks, register your card. You can’t beat their perks and freebies if you’re there a lot.

3. It will sound strange, but for me, I watch Supernatural on Netflix. Or TNT. I don’t know when I realized it, but I find it very therapeutic. I think that after ten  years of shows, almost two hundred episodes, being exposed to their personal lives and the good side of fandom, I find it very comforting. It’s well written so knowing the ending doesn’t diminish from the enjoyment of watching it more than once.

Find the thing that makes you feel comfort. It doesn’t have to make you feel good, but you don’t want it to make you feel bad. It gets me through when I know I don’t want to do anything, but I also don’t want to sit like a lump. The background noise of the show is comforting.

For me also, listening to BBC America is also comforting me. It’s those British accents. It doesn’t matter what the show is; in fact, that’s how I started watching The Hour and Orphan Black.

 

Share your go-to strategies in the comments; they might help another reader!

I Heard it in the Homily

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*This essay is about me and my dealing with things. Except in rare circumstances, my coping falls to me until and unless I ask for help. And sometimes I can’t ask.*

When I’m having a particularly difficult time, I pray for patience, courage and strength. Never one without the others. In my early days with the church, there were times when the priest said, “Let us pray.” I had no idea what to do. Make my shopping list? Think about breakfast? Write fan fic in my head for the next three minutes? But one day the words just came to me: patience, courage and strength, and just the thought of them during prayer was very calming and gives me a moment to re-focus. When I have nothing or no one specific to pray for, I can always use more patience, courage and strength.

Today was one of those days. Actually, it’s been one of those fortnights. I’ve been falling into a deeper depression and heart palpitating anxiety and sudden bursts of tears. There are several factors causing this, some that shouldn’t be reaching the level of anxiety that they are and others that are obviously out of my control.

Sometimes my coping works and sometimes it builds to a crescendo until some kind of an outburst happens. I’ve had one outburst in the last three weeks, and considering that I’ve been sick that long, the kids have taken turns being sick, my friend died, a student at my son’s high school committed suicide, my friend has had a crisis of their own and can’t help me, and payday and therapy can’t come soon enough, I think one outburst is a reasonable ratio to three weeks of time.

For example, my coping this morning when my car went sideways in the snow was very good.

My coping last October in Virginia with the idea of driving forty-five miles on a straightaway in near perfect weather was very bad and if you ask anyone present, that would be an understatement.

It’s unpredictable, this coping thing.

Some of my successful coping isn’t available (more than one thing and for varied reasons) and in addition to the coping not being accessible, the idea of the coping being unavailable increases my stress levels.

It’s hard not to blame the people around me (whether in person or by phone/text, whether by actual acts or acts of omission), even though in my mind, my logical places, I know that no one can read my mind and by the time I can, by the time I’m able to, ask for what I need, it’s often too late.

At this morning’s homily, one line blared above the others, and stood out to me:

“We are called on to be strong.”

The exact message I needed to hear today. Maybe I can get through another day if I can hold onto that.

We’re not called on for more than we are able; I truly believe that despite my much often heard whining. I’ve been strong before. I can do this until tomorrow and then see where I stand. Maybe tomorrow is the day I can reach out and my hand is grasped or maybe someone will reach for me. I don’t know. I just have to hope that I’m strong enough to endure until the depression passes or the coping returns, whether that’s through people, writing, planning, carrots, or whatever. I won’t know until it happens, but until then I am called on to be strong and the best thing I can do is believe in myself and have faith that things are going the way they should be and this moment is just that: a moment soon forgotten.