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 ...