Truth Deep Within

It’s hard to coach your child through mental illness. Hard to teach them coping skills to challenges you never faced. And wearing to always remember to be the best human - kind, understanding, supportive, encouraging... when sometimes all you want is for them to stop and get out of the car. To coach through STOPP like her therapist has taught us when all I want her to do is just stop!! And it’s tiring to continually push down your innate response to what feels like willfulness - to squelch the anger and the disappointment at yet again not being able to do some seemingly small thing. But that automatic response isn’t helpful. She doesn’t need my anger, she needs my understanding... even when she doesn’t appreciate it. And this is where I need to turn to my own DBT skills and STOPP myself.  To breathe through the anger and disappointment. To take a step back and observe - and realize that part of the anger raging through my belly is really fear that we’ll never get past this. That ev...

There's a concept in mindfulness of clearing your mind, or letting thoughts flow through you without attaching any importance or emotion or attention to them.  They flow in, and are recognized and set aside. Ultimately, you're meant to end up with a quiet peaceful blankness in your mind. That's not this.  This is a a panicked emptiness full of strangled screams that no one hears: What can I do?!  Why can't I think of anything that will help?!  Isn't there anything that can help?!  Anyone?! Anywhere?!  This is a forced silence that recognizes that nothing I say will help to make it better and quite possibly I could make it worse.  If I try to guess what's wrong, I'm just giving her something else to recognize as an issue.  If I ask her what's wrong, I create panic in her that she doesn't know. I already know she feels awful and hates what is happening in her brain, and often hates herself.  So the desire to ask how she's feeling or asking ...

I don’t understand why people cut. I truly don’t. I’ve read about release, I’ve read about control, I’ve read the articles that theoretically explain why a person would do this to their bodies. Leave all of that aside for the moment - why would they do this to their family? Why would my beloved daughter to this to me? I know it’s not about me - BUT IT IS. It’s her story, and I’m just a supporting character in her narrative. But when you gut the supporting characters over and over, your reader notices. And this is gutting.  Just when I thought we were past the danger mark... months had passed with no cutting... months with no suicide plans. We had just talked with her therapist about fully reintroducing sharps to the house, stepping up from the 3 small knives and single pair of scissors that had been reintroduced so far.  And then 36 hours of depression and she took a paring knife to her arm. They were shallow cuts, but still... new cuts on what was a com...

I wrote the below over a month ago, late in April, before the events that have rocked our world in the last week - or from a different perspective before those events brought greater visibility to a deep wound in our collective psyche that has been festering for decades on centuries. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but my heart... it hurts. She’s better... and the world is crazy. Everything make sense except my perception/reaction. I can’t relax. My heart hurts. I can’t trust she’s breathing when she’s quiet. My brain... she’s on fire. And if something happens to me, no one I know knows enough about tech to find anything I own. Even the things they need. How can I take care of them? How can I be sure they will be okay? Alright... that seems like a normal parent concern. I can’t. No parent can be sure everything’s okay. All I can do is my best. And so it makes sense that I can’t breathe. But seriously, I can’t breathe.... "I can't breathe." How different that phrase...

There’s a saying about swimming like a duck... something about seeming to glide across the water while in reality underneath a calm surface your paddling like mad. I’m not sure this is that. That implies progress, while I feel like I’m paddling madly but in no direction. Like someone threw the oars overboard... no, like they detached the paddles from my paddleboat. I keep churning my feet on those peddles, but since they’re not connected to anything.... I can think of many things I should be doing. So very many things. How many of them am I going to get done tonight? Roughly none. My heart hurts... and it’s making my brain hurt.  I want my girl to be safe. That shouldn’t be a hope that makes your heart hurt.

If suicidal ideation were a temperature, there would be a number that marked the danger line.  It could have some grey zone on either side, but everyone knows that a temperature of 100 you are sick.  At 99 you may be fighting something but you're probably fine.  At 104 you are probably headed to your doctor or urgent care.  It's clear.  There are lines.  There are treatments.  There are expectations for when schools should send kids home.  It makes sense. Therapy for suicidal ideation can offer numbers, but they are so much fuzzier.  Are you a 2 today or a 3?  How do you tell?  There's no equipment that can measure it.  There's no impartial arbiter that can smack a metaphorical hand to your forehead to tell if you're "warm".  And besides, how much difference is there really between a 2 and a 3, or 2 and a 4 for that matter?  In my family, we tend to describe a 0 as everything is fine and dandy while at 5 the world i...