A Day with My Anxiety (and a Glimpse of Depression)

"You don't deserve this life."

These are the days I feel unlovable, unnoticed, unwanted, un-being. I spend these days in my head, just lying in bed trying to convince myself to get up to use the bathroom, but the demons have me pinned down. They whisper stories of unworthiness and traumas. They convince me the safest place I have is my bed, where no one, no thing, can hurt me. But my body drives me to the bathroom and the shame begins yelling at me. "Where you really not going to go? What is wrong with you? You're driving Matt away and that will be the last straw. He'll leave you in your own filth. No one wants to be with someone so pathetic."

Filth => dirty. (How pathetic.)

Dirty => unclean. (You should shower.)

Unclean => dark heart. (Remember the last time in the shower with the razor?!?! Maybe not.)

Dark heart => fear. (I can't trust you or the world today.)

Fear => run. (Let's go back to bed.)

I crawl back into bed, put on a cartoon I've seen before, and wait for sleep to come. Just going to the bathroom is exhausting. At least in my dreams nothing can hurt me, but the whispers start and sleep is impossible. "What if there's a fire? What if someone breaks into the house and kills you in your sleep?" The world is untrustworthy today. So, I stay awake and watch my cartoons, quietly and with as little movement as possible. I can't let anyone know where I am! "You are such a coward!"

Coward => fear (How pathetic.)

Fear => control (How can we make sure you're safe?)

Control => doubt (You can't control everything.)

Doubt => bravery (But you can control your response.)

Bravery => awake (Let's take a shower.)

I jump in the shower and my inner voice starts whispering to you. "Wow! You mustered up the bravery (Ha! Not the band!) to face your world. You soothed those demons. Even if you didn't get out of bed, you deserve today. You deserve life!"

It's that splinter of hope that gets me through the day. Even if it means I just crawled back into bed, at least I know I'm clean.

Healing the Wounded Child Within

It has certainly been an interesting month. Working with depression has been quite the journey. Depending on the therapist I speak with, I either have a depressive mood disorder or full on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Either way, anxiety and depression play a major roll in my mental health. I've been on medications to help regulate my moods, as I can seem fine one moment and then next I'll be in a fit of tears not wanting to live anymore. I have bouts of insomnia where I am lucky I can get an hour of sleep in a night. I've blacked out and found myself on the floor of my kitchen not really knowing how I got there. This has certainly inspired me to take an introspective journey to see what I can find to heal myself. This has resulted in my quitting my job, moving away from the city, and learning to live a less rushed life. I honestly feel like the most selfish person in the whole world at the moment, but I was told by a hospital therapist that being consciously selfish and self-centered is good when we know it is to help ourselves heal and be whole again. This therapist also gave me great insight into myself, into a source of distress and anxiety.

At the time, it was labeled abuse. I had endured verbal, emotional, psychological, physical, and sexual abuse from those closest and not so close to me. This came to me as a great shock at the time because as most abuse-takers, I felt I deserved everything I had received. It has been a year since that revelation and I have made some good insight into my source of depression and anxiety. (Actually, more like my anxiety followed by depression.) A lot of it comes from the wounded child within me.

I have read a lot of self-help books that speak on the wounded child. I just know for certain there is a wounded child in me. I began realizing this child through meditation and mindfulness. Through meditation, I could consciously make space and call upon my wounded child to talk. I'll admit, it felt pretty silly in the beginning because it felt like I was just making stuff up and pretending. But after some time, I began recognizing this child, not only through the emotions it carried but its self-image. When I would speak to the teenager, I could see she felt herself physically grown (I mean I had boobs by then!) but still not emotionally strong enough to stand up for herself. When I would speak with the nine year-old, I could see she thought herself physically small and unable to defend herself. One time, I could recall what it was like being two or younger and feeling my vulnerability to the adults who handled me. I could recall the pressure on my rib cage as they picked me up and how a hard squeeze could crush them. Here I found my distrust of my caretakers and the world beginning. In these meditation journeys, I would listen to them and hear their stories.

Sometimes they would call out to me and I had to bring my mindfulness to the situation to decipher between their voice and my current voice. A flashing memory from my childhood would pop into my mind and I would just burst into tears, or I would wake up in the middle of the night with a feeling a gasping for breath with an unbearable dread of everything. In these moments I had to first sooth myself, saying things like "It's ok. You're ok. It's 2015 and I'm [age]. You're not alone, I'm here." Then with time I can either get a clear picture of the memory that flashed so quickly before my eyes, or begin understanding where the emotion came from. This acknowledgment helped sooth fears and has made sleeping at night a bit more restful, but I had to go one step further and honor the feelings they sent me. For instance, I had to acknowledge and honor the anxiety I felt at the thought of spending time alone with someone who had abused me in the past -- and would have to consciously make the decision not to hangout with them alone, regardless of their insistence or feelings. I have to remind myself that their reactions are their own and I am not responsible for their choice to feel the emotions they take on.

This is never easy, especially for me, as guilt and withholding love has always been a source of manipulation growing up. So, by not agreeing to do what the other person wanted me to do they would begin withholding their attention and affection from me. Or they would make a large dramatic show of how bad they felt because of me and my selfish, asshole behavior. This caused me to have such weak boundaries, I would find myself repeatedly hanging out with people I didn't much care for or pretending to like something I didn't want to do from the beginning. I didn't really acknowledge its impact until I heard a voice cry out "Why can't you just love me?" when confronted with these situations. Of course I had to ask who because I don't think I was talking about my co-worker who was trying to get me to do an extra set of planks. A conversation with my siblings helped me recall who I was talking about and of course it was my mother. Bum bum bum! Mommy issues! Who didn't see that one coming? Anyone? No one? Well, dang! It blindsided me as I thought I was always well loved by my mom, but there was always that withdrawal I feared of and would do anything to make her continue loving me. I guess you could say I grew up with the notion that there was only conditional love, that as long as you gave the other person what they wanted they will love you.

I can't honestly say if this is a true statement, at least not a universally true statement. But the wounded child within me was aching for this unconditional love. I found with this conditional love belief, I applied it to myself. I would be mean to myself when I wouldn't achieve my goals and stop loving myself despite my mistakes or shortcomings. So I posed the question unto myself, "Why can't I love myself unconditionally?" Let everyone else put conditions on how and when and why they love me, but I will be my own source of unconditional love. So I turned to my wounded child within and said, "I will love you unconditionally." She was pleased to hear that. Like all children, she then settled down and began playing again. Perhaps that is all the wounded children of the world are looking for, a source of unconditional love, at least that is what my wounded child was looking for. I'm not perfect, I'm still practicing this idea on a daily basis. There are days my old habits take over and I begin abusing myself and withholding affection, but through mindfulness and meditation I can return back to that loving kindness that everyone deserves.

So, I have found a way to help heal my wounded child and learn to love everyone unconditionally, even those who have abused me in the past. This does not make me a doormat, as I will still honor my feelings and boundaries -- and not intintially put myself in harms way for the sake of pleasing someone else.  As Elizabeth Gilbert said quoting a monk she studied with,

"We are obligated to love everybody in the world. But some people we must love from a safe distance."  

The Power of Meditation

This last year held some devastating events that really forced me to stop and give meditation a second chance. I was hospitalized for clinical depression. It was a scary but enlightening event in my life. I saw people of different walks of life going through things similar to myself and others who's circumstances were beyond my understanding. In the end, we all suffered from demons that swelled deep within us and that we wanted to be rid of. One of the greatest pieces of wisdom I received was from a technician. I was describing to him my day and how horrible I felt. I told him how I thought my psychologist was pretty much telling me to suck it up and act better. I felt like a failure because I couldn't get my act together like everyone expected. He patiently listened to me and when I was done talking he said, "[something supporting what my psychologist said]..., but it also means being kind to yourself."

I had not really considered being kind to myself until he said that. I always thought life was a struggle and I just had to muscle through unpleasantness to reap the rewards. In the end, the rewards were bitter, unsatisfying at best, leaving me resentful at the world that cheated me. I didn't realize it at the time, but those words set me off on a journey. I think at a subconscious level I needed to learn to cultivate this idea in my life. I needed to learn to be kind to myself. So, I began exploring different avenues that could support this goal.

I did what was natural to me at the time. I began intellectualizing this goal. I turned it into a problem that just needed to be solved. I mean, years of software development and business analysis kind of lends my mind to problem solving. I just needed to fix myself. I so desperately wanted to be happy. I wanted to be "normal". I wanted to erase the effects of being in the hospital, of feeling broken or being a mess. I read books upon books. So many acronyms! DBT, CBT, ACT, PTSD. I was reading if you could master these skills you would finally break through that cloud of depression. Yet, each new acronym left me more frustrated and broken -- until I learned about smart mind. My psychiatrist was recommending learning to just learn to acknowledge how I feel, which at the time felt stupid. I could tell him, "I'm depressed! What more can I say?" But this idea started marinating and my brain, my brilliantly analytical brain, started rummaging around to find something I could relate his words to. I had come across this idea before.

Then one day it clicked, silently in the back of my mind. I remembered how much yoga promised at least calm, which would be a relief for my overly anxious and depressed brain. I did yoga when I was younger, but only for the physical health benefits and to feed my vanity of keeping a "dancer" body. (I have never been a dancer, just to be clear. But I thought they were beautiful, graceful people -- which I never felt I was. So, it was always faltering to be compared to them.) I wanted to flexible and beautiful and healthy. I totally ignored the meditation portion of yoga thinking that was for old farts who had life all figured out and had time to sit around for hours at a time. This time around, my yoga teacher recommended doing a 30 day affirmation program, where I would get a new affirmation every morning to take around with me for the day. Of course she had to explain to that meditation wasn't about sitting around thinking about one thing all day. She said meditation was learning to sit and be, either with an idea, with your environment or simply with yourself. She recommended, when I felt like I was slipping into old thought patterns, pull out the affirmation (either literally or figuratively) and sit with it.

The first affirmation sent me on a trip that broke the cycles of my depression and allowed my mind to finally acknowledge my feelings. It was, "Self-compassion: Stepping back into warmth and kindness." She recommended allowing ourselves to step back int warmth and kindness for ourselves, especially at time when we felt sad and angry. It was in these moments where one needs warmth and kindness the most. Upon reading this, I figured "Psh, piece of cake!" Then just hours after receiving the first affirmation, I found myself beating myself up for screwing up on a work assignment. I tried reaching for warmth and kindness, but my mind stopped short telling me I didn't deserve this warmth and kindness. "Only after you fix your mistake can you have this warmth and kindness." Whoa! This internal dialogue really made me conscious of how I felt. I felt the familiar chill of depression creeping over me. My brain was going to explode attempting to hold all these emotions in, fixing my mistake, and trying to practice my affirmation. Hour 6 and I was ready to quit. I was ready to quit. I didn't have what it takes to make these kind of internal paradigm shifts. But a quick revisit to the affirmation and my teachers description of what this affirmation meant, I realized that I needed to acknowledge my feelings to withhold warmth and kindness from myself and the effects those feelings had on my emotional state. My psychiatrists words finally made sense! I could find that within my depression I was not only sad, but I was frustrated that I couldn't be loved when I needed it most, I felt unworthy of affection in general, belittled and ashamed. So, I coaxed the part of my mind that felt I needed to withhold to give just a little affection. When I did, I found my mind eased up and I was able to fix my mistakes at work with a feeling of accomplishment when I was done! It was amazing!

Moving forward from that first day, I have been able to sit with some very difficult emotions and memories that I never thought I could revisit, as well as redefine relationships with other people, myself and reality to suit my needs and desires. With warmth and kindness, I can accept the things I cannot change -- whether it is my internal or external reality. There are things from my past that have haunted me for years, but at least now I can look at them and give myself the support I need to heal. I may not currently be in a position to forgive those who have wronged me, but I know eventually it will happen as long as I can forgive myself.