Measuring Progress in Recovery

I'm at a strange stage in my recovery. It's not a 'crossroads', I'm not in 'limbo', I'm not even 'stagnating', but I am living with a sense of tension and unease. My problem is the future - or the fact that I cannot see what's going to happen in the future. Now, in reality I have never been able to see ahead in time, but I have always had plans, ambitions, career paths to follow, so it created the illusion that I had some control over how my life was progressing.

I don't think I'm any different or less able to read the future than anyone else, I have just become more acutely aware of how quickly my plans can go awry, just like Rabbie Burns' 'mice and men'. Having had an unremitting cycle of work and retraining, relocation and travel over the years, it is an alien experience to have lived in one place for more than a decade. Up until the last three years I have also had the stability of a career with a definite career progression. Surely that is what stability is built on? Yet, I don't think I have been as peaceful and untroubled by emotional storms as I have in the past year.

Nonetheless I am troubled by the short term nature of my ability to provide for myself. Going by the patterns of the past I SHOULD be relaunching myself in a new direction, be completely absorbed by a new job and praised for my external progression. My problem at the moment is that any opportunities to help out or volunteer are short term and sporadic. I feel the pressure to go back to work, but the idea of applying for full time work is so troubling that few people venture to ask and I daren't even consider the possibility, even though, on the surface, that would provide the greatest stability - financially.

As I write this, I realise I am in a process of adjusting my life to new priorities. My greatest needs are to manage my emotional life so that I don't regress to the inexorable daily cycles of damaging emotions and behaviours that have marked most of my life. That means that looking ahead is not helpful.

I am only able to plan up to a month in advance. I have a monthly meeting as part of the Experts by Experience group of my local NHS Trust. I am still meeting with people one to one to help them with Mental Health needs as part of my involvement in the church. Over the past three months, having had some disruption to my emotions caused by the pressures of managing the needs of elderly parents who live at a distance, I have learned to set the running of a five week course to one side - and learned that the sky didn't fall in because I put my own health first. Overall, it means that I have managed my mental health well and managed not to slip back into emotional dysfunction.

I need time to be able to reflect on these changes as realities which indicate that my progress in recovery and managing the symptoms of my BPD continues, but is not at an end, or, indeed an end in itself.

One of my biggest challenges is creating my own patterns without the regular hours of paid work. This includes valuing what I am able to do as helpful and contributing to those around me as I am able, without having the external validation of a pay packet at the end of the month. After over 35 years working in various jobs and careers this continues to be a battle. If I am able to turn up to events at church that means I am part of a community and I am valuable simply as myself. When I am asked to help out in developing a website and writing the odd article that means I can enjoy using skills and experience I have developed over the years. I need to change my internal validation compass to accept that I am contributing in a positive way without having a salary point to indicate my 'progress'.

Of course there is a daily reality of bills to pay. I know that it would be good if my progress could result in rejoining the ranks of those who are paid to work. At the moment I am learning to accept that whilst I am capable of working, my emotional resilience casts a question over how far I would be able to sustain a full time role. So, again I come back to looking ahead and seeing only bends in the road. Acceptance means that I settle my ambitious, career driven self to the here and now. Recognising the need some days to give myself a break means that I would not be the ideal employee at the moment, particularly in a nine to five, five days a week environment. Some structure would be nice, though.

Small Things

When your mind and body are wracked with emotional pain, it is so difficult to do the most simple routine things. Few people who have never experienced mental illness, understand the physical impact of such struggles. When you manage to do small things, don't belittle them or discount them, Celebrate them, it has cost you and is a real achievement. The Black Dog Tribe have shared this cartoon which sums it up nicely:

When it hurts to get up and about remember the following:

1) Be kind to yourself - you would give others a break if you saw them in the same situation.
2) Be realistic about what you can do safely
3) Celebrate the small things
4) Try to enjoy the sense of achievement

Ya Get Me?

I love the English language. I toy with it, play with it, take words and mess with them, a bit like a trick footballer playing with a ball. Sometimes it's a bit random - especially when a word enters my head and I need to hear what it sounds like out loud. I especially love it when I discover some new 'in' word or phrase.

Recently I've been fascinated by people saying, 'ya get me?' after almost everything they say. I guess it is a way of making sure that your listeners are, in fact, listening. On another level though, it's also a way of checking out you are being understood. That started me thinking, maybe I need to start using it especially when talking about my mental health.

For most people with BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) there is a sense of unease, a lack of belonging that is all pervasive. I had grown up with a sense of not being able to connect with the world and, more especially, with the people around me. I had a sense of otherness, of being an alien in a world that failed to notice how much I was struggling to belong. My nickname as a child was 'Moonman'- says it all really. I also did not communicate with adults, seeking to communicate through one childhood friend in particular, until the school in their wisdom removed him from me and forced me to try to speak to teachers and others at school. I was six before I was really able to do that.

This sense of alienation is a hallmark of BPD, a condition which creates a gulf between me and those around me, and which no one, but me is aware of. The only way I found to describe it when trying to help GPs and others understand, before my diagnosis, was a sense that I was 'locked inside my own heading screaming'. When I was most distressed I kept repeating 'I am not made for this world. The problem for me was that in my day to day life no one could see my distress, or if they did, they didn't understand its causes.

Lack of stable identity, caused by an inability to make emotional sense of the world around me is a symptom of BPD which goes to the core of the social theories of its causes. If we learn about our place in the world through the responses from those around us, then the invalidating home and family environment becomes a twisted mirror in which a distorted image of the self is formed. So, paradoxically the relationships which are most problematic to me are those which value me - they just clash with the internalised invalidated image and so are often rejected as untrustworthy. If the internal monologue of self criticism and self hatred meets with evidence to the contrary the resulting dissonance can be unbearable.

I am more comfortable with the feelings of failure and disconnection with the relationships around me, than I am with affirming, loving relationships. If my fundamental belief about myself is that I not worthy of life affirming love, then it is hardly surprising that I allow myself to become involved with destructive and abusive relationships. They are where I believe I belong.

As I work on my recovery I am trying to learn to find validation in small things at first. However, one of the ways that I still struggle to make people 'get me' is that I do probably need more affirmation in work and social situations than most people. The twisted mirror image of myself is still in the process of being untwisted. Slowly, I am trusting myself to develop new relationships. Trust takes time.

Being an alien, in a strange planet it is often easier to spend most of my time alone. This was one of my major coping mechanisms in the past. I deliberately retreated from intimate relationships because I just couldn't make sense of them, nor could my boyfriends make sense of the contradictions in me. On the one hand I craved affection, but on the other I behaved constantly in ways which would drive a wedge between us. The role of alien was so much more comfortable to me, then, than the sense of belonging to and with someone. There were times when I could happily go for weeks on end without any meaningful contact with anyone. It was safe, unchallenging and didn't cause any jarring or contradiction to my internalised view of myself. What I didn't realise for years, was that this was reinforcing the sense of isolation I was trying to combat.

Where am I today? I am trying to find new ways of connecting with the world around me. I am having to learn that patterns of invalidation established from early childhood will take time to change. I am trying out new ways of relating to friends, without retreating into becoming a recluse in order to protect myself from kindness and affection. The structure offered by the DBT Inter Personal Effectiveness Module helps me to find my place in most relationship situations. In the past I would swing wildly between shutting myself off and exposing myself too early in relationships usually sharing way too much about my struggles and my past history. I am consciously holding back when I need to in order to build trust on both sides of relationships.

So do 'ya get me?' The reality is that there are many times when I don't get myself. I am working on rebuilding my sense of self, without the overlaid turmoil of out of control emotions and moods, and the non stop internal self condemnatory commentary. All of which is a new experience for me, not all of it comfortable or pleasant. Slowly, but surely I am untwisting the mirror image.

Help I can't be Mindful, because my Mind is Full...

As I have moved through my recovery I am noticing that my mind is swinging from being full of 'cotton wool' to being full of ideas and thoughts to keep me 'occupied'. It is only in the last couple of days, and a few weeks of disrupted sleep patterns, that I have recognised that it is becoming an obstacle to me practising mindfulness. So I'm going back to the basics of Mindfulness to move from Mind Full to being Mindful...

1) The first thing is to notice that my mind is crammed. And to notice that these thoughts, a lot of them 'worry thoughts', are preventing me from seeing the positives around me at the moment. My Therapist did an exercise with me using my interlaced fingers to help me realise that the 'wall of thoughts' is preventing me from living in the moment, simply because I cannot see anything beyond these thoughts. So I need to let go of them and not stop with noticing the wall of thinking in front of my eyes.

2) Practice the exercises which allow me to diffuse thoughts and feelings - I use my safe place (a river bank in the Yorkshire Dales) and my thoughts attach to the leaves on a tree overhanging the river. I watch as they detach, float down onto the river and let the flow of the water take the thoughts away. At the moment, because I am in a 'hyper' mood I need to begin with focusing my mind by mindful breathing.

3) I need to be aware that activity is not validating on its own - where does my real validation come from? Can I accept myself as I am, that I am worth something without a paid role? This is an ongoing battle and is critical and foundational to my long term recovery. Self compassion and self acceptance, again, are something that I have to practice. So I am using self soothe, and some mindfulness exercises based on 'Loving Kindness' that I've downloaded from t'internet.

The human mind is an amazing gift, but it needs to 'tamed' and brought into line with life as it is, right now, so that it is not getting in the way of my enjoying the present.

Housework - the forgotten symptom....

My house I've realised reveals a lot about my mental health. When I'm up and when I'm down.... it's like a barometer of my emotional life. I remember a cartoon from my childhood with a dog called 'What-a-mess'. I loved that dog: I think I am that dog!

Most of the time my public face is usually fairly presentable, which is why anyone who looked inside my mind or my home (at times) would probably be surprised to see the extent of my inner 'What-a-Mess'. Someone asked me today, 'do you think that you have a problem with people thinking that you're competent and confident?' Now, I know he doesn't mean, that people find me so overwhelmingly competent and confident that they can't relate to me. I think he meant that people have a hard time accepting that I could be suffering from complex mental health issues. Maybe if I were more like What-a-Mess, ie people able to see the extent of my 'disarray' then there would be less questioning of the fact of my struggles and perhaps more acceptance when I need 'space' from people and the world around me.

The thing is, when people have entered my home (which has happened on just four occasions in the past year) it is obvious that all is not well in the 'State of Denmark'. In fact, I am rather ashamed of my 'bolthole'. I realise that using all my energy to manage my 'public face' leaves me relatively little energy to take care of my most important environment.

I am realising more and more that this reflects the biggest struggle I have as I move forward towards full recovery - a lack of self validation. My home reflects the value I place on myself. All my energy seems to be directed at maintaining my competent image to the world outside. Would I be better served letting out my inner 'What-a-Mess' to the world outside, or is the answer about finding more balance in my life, between my public and private lives?

Balance is always preferable to living at extremes of different spectrums. I don't have to choose between being What-a-Mess and Aggie and Kim, I just have to be able to invest in my home so that it is somewhere that does not generate negative emotions like 'shame'. My aim is to improve the environment to which I retreat from the world to recharge my batteries. To do so means that I should be trying to have enough energy left in each week to allow me to take care of myself: cooking, personal hygiene, housework, relaxation etc. In practical terms, I need to see my physical environment as being part of the nurturing relationships that are helping my emotional life.

I need my home to be a retreat, a nest, a safe place, when my mind and emotions are very much 'What-a-Mess'!