Blog on hiatus for the next 1-2 months.

Optimism simply doesn’t work for everybody. Some of us actively find hope in pessimism. We manage our anxieties and counter our depression through negative attitudes. Take away our negative outlooks, and we end up drowning in doubt and fear.

I know this sounds contradictory, but there is even a name for this concept: defensive pessimism

I believe that if we have this seed inside of us, then hope still has a chance. Because everything else on that checklist, in my opinion, can be learned. Goal-directed behavior, social skills necessary to form supportive relationships, a belief in yourself and your abilities, even the will to live are all learnable behaviors. Trauma did not kill hope. It merely made it more difficult for it to grow.

How can you ask someone else to treat you kindly, when you cannot even be kind to yourself? How can you demand to not be invalidated, when you don’t have enough faith in yourself to even know if you are valid? How can you request the world change its behaviors to ensure your safety when you are unwilling to allow yourself safety?

Whether we like it or not, negativity bias does serve a purpose. It can help us assess and deal with real threats in our life. Getting rid of negative awareness completely can lead to reckless behaviors and disastrous consequences. As we know, though, focusing only on the negative can do the same.

Complex trauma occurs over long periods of time. Also, it typically results from loss of control. Events or persons outside of your control have hijacked your life making it impossible for you to escape the trauma. Because of this, it has the ability to significantly rewire your brain, alter your personality, and even significantly affect your development.

Simple joys aside, I also see Halloween as an important marker in my annual mental health cycle. It is the last hurrah, so to speak, before the darkness, cold, and commercialized holiday season. This holiday is a perfectly placed reminder to have gratitude for the year, store up for the winter, and prepare for the difficult days ahead.

Being less regulated essentially means that the FDA is not overly concerned with the effectiveness or quality of dietary supplements. What they are concerned with is safety. This is why the first step in ensuring a dietary supplement company is a good one is to verify they are complying with FDA regulations.

It is important to remember, that supplements, despite what the U.S. government allows companies and labels to say, are very much medicinal. They impact your body and your health in significant, meaningful ways. Also, because of the nature of the regulations in our country and the very nature of supplements (especially herbs) they are much less standardized than medicines.

Advocates encourage us to apply this idea of neurodiversity to “disorders” such as Bipolar, Schizophrenia, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and many others. In essence, they encourage us to embrace the differences that come with mental health struggles. They suggest that perhaps it is society that needs to change on the fundamental level to allow for these people, not the people who must change on a fundamental level to accommodate society.

The benefits are impressive and varied, which is why meditation practice is encouraged for everything from cancer to depression and organ transplants to PTSD. But just because meditation can do so much for so many, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will do everything for everybody. And, if you are like me, the very fact that EVERYONE is touting it, encouraging it, and wagging it about in your face can you make very reluctant to try it all.

This is why, when a high-stress event occurs, whether that event is created by reality or by my inner wiring, I use it as a flashlight to illuminate the tapestry that is my mental health. I search for the loose threads so that I can reweave them into the fabric. I do not believe myself to broken. But I do believe in growing. I believe in wanting to be as strong, as capable, as healthy, and as happy as I can possibly be. It takes effort, but it is effort well spent.

We have underlying issues in how our brains are formed and process information. Many of the “symptoms” we experience are simply the result of how our brains react to the world and how we process the information we receive. Our brains and bodies (through genetics, womb stress, childhood trauma, and other environmental factors) are primed to process and react to information in a way that deviates from societal norms. It is this deviation that results in a “mental illness”. If enough of our symptoms match diagnosis A, then that is how you will be labeled. If enough match diagnosis B, then that will be your label. For many, these labels are not a perfect fit.

Society takes the natural, human creation and use of labels, and turns it into a system of control. Labels are used as an attempt to align us back into the story. To make us start following the script. To use our intrinsic needs for belonging and acceptance against us. Labels have positive connotations and positive perceptions, when those traits represented by labels serve society. They have negative connotations and negative perceptions when the represented traits deviate from societal expectations and scripts.

When it comes to exercise and depression, it turns out that frequency may be more important than intensity or duration. What does this mean? It means that what is truly important is getting moving regularly. Starting out, you don’t need to be as concerned with how long you are being physically active or how hard you are doing the activity. The key is to just do it, and do it as often as you can.

I know that is still a very tall order when you are experiencing depression. So, here are a few suggestions that might help you to get moving.

The Fairy Godmother isn’t a bad role actually. To start with, you have control. Unlike the hapless princess, you are creating and shaping the reality around you. Flipping off the fates and creating plot twists. It’s also a lot less exhausting than being a villain. That much wardrobe, makeup, and brand take a lot of upkeep. And the anger, pain, and grudges clenched so tightly inside take a heavy toll on your psyche, body, and life. The prince role isn’t half bad. He is a rescuer after all. The problem with being a rescuer, though: it’s a lifetime commitment. After the excitement and interest and potential to do things has passed, you’re still supposed to be there staring awkwardly at this person you barely know. Living constantly with the rescuer/damsel-in-distress dynamic that you created in your relationship. The Fairy Godmother is where it’s at.

Maybe this is why I never really cared about beauty before. I had been too busy surviving, deprogramming, and struggling. Now that I am stable enough to begin seeing the beauty around me, though, I want to keep seeing it. I want to purposely seek out beauty when and where I can find it. To begin experiencing beauty not as a foreign concept that has nothing to do with me, but as a lived experience that is part of my life.

The phrase “I can’t” is encountered frequently in adulthood, just as much, if not more so, than it is in children. I have heard this phrase used as a reality and as a manipulation. And have frequently been resentful or annoyed towards people who use it frequently. Seeing it as a way for them to foist their responsibility on to someone else. A triggering issue for me when the someone else is me. But I have also used the phrase myself technically when it was not true as well. And possibly even as a means of manipulation. Today, I wanted to look at the meaning of these two tiny words. The concrete meaning as well as the unique and multiple meanings this phrase can hold in a variety of situations.

In the last installment of the Different Functional Blog, we examined some of the fundamental reasons why healing from trauma is such a difficult process. And why the individual often seems resistant to healing or change at all. In this installment, I want to focus in on the relational context of this journey.

Maybe there are some individuals out there who hare able, through some miracle, to take a journey of healing in this manner. The reality I have experienced in my own life, learned of in my studies, and seen in my experiences with others who are healing is this: It get’s worse, before it get’s better. Healing is not a simple journey upward. It’s a dangerous switchback path on a mountainside with no railing. And often, initially, you won’t even be moving upward at all. You will be trembling in the mud, digging fruitlessly with broken fingernails trying desperately to sink even deeper into the despair you should be clamoring to escape.