Not the Right Empty Brain

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 about anything that I know makes it worse (things happening with friends, etc.) is just me wanting her to talk - it's not her wanting to talk about it, which means it risks her shutting down.  I can offer small inlets that provide her with easy openings to talk, but I can't make her want to talk.

And so I feel like I've spent a fair amount of time in the past months in silence, sometimes forced, sometimes backed with silent screams of inadequacy in my brain.  An empty brain when I wished that it was full of skills and ideas that would help.  The wrong empty brain.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Own DBT Skills

Image
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...
Read more

A Stretch of Normal

Image
  I read a quote from one of my favorite authors (Ilona Andrews) tonight... "I wanted there to be a stretch of normal, if not for a few months, then at least for a few weeks."   I identify with this So. Very. Much.   Every time I think we break free, the riptide pulls her back out.  We made it a whole week this time before she willingly dove back under the wave and surrendered to the tide pulling her out to sea.  Who does that? Why?  WHY!?!?!? It makes zero sense - zero - to willingly walk into something that rips you apart. And yet she does it over and over again. I will never understand this.   But I can't help her unless I understand and identify... right?  I can't help her to swim away (left... right... not sure I care) unless she understands that she is caught by a killer current and that therefore treading water or swimming forward/back are either useless or actively injurious. She can't recognize it as a current just because ...
Read more