Why I'm not Making any Resolutions!

I'm not making any New Year Resolutions this year. I've decided that in the past they have not been effective for a number of reasons:

1. Human Nature. It is a truth that the 'road to hell is paved with good intentions'. Too often my intention to become a slimmer, fitter, better tempered, more cultured, creative, more altruistic version of myself has foundered within an embarassingly short period of time.

2. Too High Expectations. Unsurprisingly, when setting myself a goal of losing five stone within three months I also set myself up to fail - perhaps it's an inbuilt protection against change - after all I know what failure feels like and change is scary!

3. The Wrong Goals. Too many times in the past I have tried to set resolutions which are more about what other people think I should be aiming at. Rather than about my own happiness and contentment.

4. A tendency to want to take over the world. In the past I have tried to take responsibility for all the world's ills and seek to resolve them with my own efforts. I have learned that I cannot change the world, but I can try to change the world for one person at a time.

So, this year it will be different.

1. Every day I set myself small goals - achieving the ongoing small victories over my battles with mental illness. These include keeping to a routine. So change needs to happen in a stable framework, acknowledging each positive step forward.

2. If I am not stuck in the past and I am moving forward with my life, then change must be happening, because that is the nature of growth and maturity. Recognising that I am not stagnating means that I don't need to create momentum falsely, it is already happening as a process of choosing to live.

3. My life has meaning beyond fitness regimes and diets, which often are the focus of resolutions. My beliefs inform the direction of my life - change, long term change, requires hope. Hope is born from engaging actively with something larger than ourselves, whether that is God or being part of the wider world around us.

In 2014 I will have only one goal - to keep moving forward to wellness, taking each step forward and accepting each moment as it is.

So...That was Then...This is Now...

I started writing this blog in 2010 - still reeling from finding out that my 'emotional issues' since childhood had a name and could be understood beyond my being 'oversensitive', 'overdramatic' and 'overstimulated' (amazing what comes out of angry confrontations!).

It has taken me three years to adjust to a diagnosis of BPD with a lovely side order of severe Clinical Depression. It took until the age of 42 and numerous periods of: instability, breakdown (of self and relationships), relocation and rebuilding to find that my life patterns had a cause and some hope of a remedy.

I am forever grateful to the CPN (still with me after all these years - possibly the longest adult relationship I've managed to maintain longer than three years) who saw through my 'apparent competence' and my 'high functionality' to see that I was screaming out for help. Patterns of Self Harm and risk of suicide associated with BPD distract some professionals from listening to the pain being expressed. I used to describe myself as being 'trapped inside my own head, screaming'!

For me no one knew that I self harmed (I was working with cases who tended to have the same patterns of self abuse and emotional stability as I was experiencing). My professionalism was a dam holding back the torrents of emotional distress tumbling around inside me. My biggest fear was losing my job, my raison d'etre, the only effective means of self validation I had at the time. So I knew that admitting that I had made detailed plans to end my life ironically, was the last thing I wanted to do. But in an assessment, begged for by my GP who fought so hard for people to look beyond the surface, for the first time someone asked me directly how far I had gone in planning to commit suicide - suddenly it was ok to let it all out and my life as I knew it came to a juddering halt...in time for people to recognise how much emotional distress I was experiencing. The mask was off and it was all there for anyone who cared to look to see.

Some of the most comforting words spoken to me around this time were - 'your response is understandable', 'it's ok to feel low' - I was allowed to struggle due to my previous experience of life. At that time suicide seemed like an answer to unbearable emotional pain, but to quote Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones 'Death is so very final'.

At the moment, I am attending a DBT graduate group - just like that! 14 months of DBT Skills Group and individual therapy have flown by and I recognise that I have come a long way since my juddering halt...so much learning has happened. One of the most freeing realisations has been that although I may be a product of my past, I don't have to remain as its prisoner! It is exceptionally freeing to recognise that the 'solutions' to my emotional pain, no longer have to be so final. Today, I am learning to accept each moment, with all its feelings, good or bad, while changing what can be changed in me.