Tag: coping

Patton Oswalt – To all my fellow depressives, getting hit… | Facebook

~ Sephira ~ Leave a comment

To all my fellow depressives, getting hit hard by the suddenly shorter, colder days? I’m with you. I’m on an unshakeable schedule when it comes to Seasonal Activated Depression (SAD – aww. Nice acronym. But wouldn’t Feeling Under-Cheerful, Killing The Happy Inside Syndrome be more accurate?)

Leading up to Halloween? Couldn’t be happier. The second after midnight on the 31st? The gloom & grey come down like a mildewy theatre curtain.

Please don’t forget, these next few months, until the spring kicks in and we can all start skateboarding on the serotonin rainbow of summer – you CAN get through this. One way is to go regularly help someone else. In a big or small way. Talk to someone regularly, or bring someone food or just your company. One selfish benefit of charity is it gives you a free vacation from inside your own head. Don’t worry – all that gorgeous nonsense & noise you’ve got rattling around inside your skull will politely wait until you come back.

And now I’m going to give you a weird piece of advice that’s always worked for me.

Read something Russian. Novel, short story, play, poem. Especially Pushkin or Dostoyevsky. Holy moley did those guys live train wreck lives, and they lived them in a state of near-constant, tomb-like winter.

They didn’t write happy stuff, those Russians. But man did they sling some defiant word-bricks at the darkness, as if to say, to their own depression and madness, “I own YOU. You’re merely renting space within my mind & soul. You REALLY want to stake a claim to my headspace? Then you’re gonna have to share it with some darkness of my OWN creation. I’m gonna give you a roommate called CRIME & PUNISHMENT that’ll
send you screaming out onto the Russian steppes.”

Read something Russian. Remind your depression that you have access to ancient, arctic gloom-blasts, and that if you can’t make it leave your head, you can sure as shit frighten it into being a polite guest until the snow melts.

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Patton Oswalt – To all my fellow depressives, getting hit… | Facebook

10 Things to Stop Doing If Your Loved One Is an Alcoholic

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Here are 10 things that you can stop doing that may help relieve some of the stress involved in living with an alcoholic.

1. Blaming Yourself

It’s typical for alcoholics to try to blame their drinking on circumstances or others around them, including those who are closest to them. It’s not unusual to hear an alcoholic say, “The only reason I drink is because you…” Don’t buy into it. If your loved one is truly an alcoholic, they are going to drink no matter what you do or say. It’s not your fault. They have become dependent on alcohol, and nothing is going to get between them and their drug of choice.

2. Taking It Personally

When alcoholics promise they will never drink again, but a short time later are back to drinking as much as always, it is easy for family members to take the broken promises and lies personally. You may tend to think, “If they really love me, they wouldn’t lie to me.” But if they have become truly addicted to alcohol, their brain chemistry may have changed to the point that they are completely surprised by some of the choices they make. They may not be in control of their own decision making.

3. Trying to Control It

Many family members of alcoholics naturally try everything they can think of to get their loved one to stop drinking. Unfortunately, this usually results in leaving the alcoholic’s family members feeling lonely and frustrated. You may tell yourself that surely there is something that you can do, but the reality is not even alcoholics can control their drinking, try as they may.

4. Trying to Cure It

Make no mistake about it, alcoholism, or alcohol dependence, is a primary, chronic and progressive disease that sometimes can be fatal. You are not a healthcare professional. You are not a trained substance-abuse counselor. You just happen to love someone who is probably going to need professional treatment to get healthy again. That’s the alcoholic’s responsibility, not yours. You can’t cure a disease.

5. Covering It Up

There is a joke in recovery circles about an alcoholic in denial who screams, “I don’t have a problem, so don’t tell anyone!” Alcoholics typically do not want anyone to know the level of their alcohol consumption because if someone found out the full extent of the problem, they might try to help! If family members try to “help” the alcoholic by covering up for their drinking and making excuses for them, they are playing right into the alcoholic’s denial game. Dealing with the problem openly and honestly is the best approach.

6. Accepting Unacceptable Behavior

It usually begins with some small incident that family members brush off with, “They just had too much to drink.” But the next time, the behavior may get a little bit worse and then even worse. You slowly begin to accept more and more unacceptable behavior. Before you realize it, you can find yourself in a full-blown abusive relationship. Abuse is never acceptable. You do not have to accept unacceptable behavior in your life. You do have choices.

7. Having Unreasonable Expectations

One problem in dealing with an alcoholic is that what might seem like a reasonable expectation in some circumstances, might be totally unreasonable with an addict. When alcoholics swear to you and to themselves that they will never touch another drop, you might naturally expect that they are sincere and they won’t drink again. But with alcoholics, that expectation turns out to be unreasonable. Is it reasonable to expect someone to be honest with you when they are incapable of even being honest with himself or herself?

8. Living in the Past

The key to dealing with alcoholism in the family is staying focused on the situation as it exists right now, today. Alcoholism is a progressive disease. It doesn’t reach a certain level and remain there for very long; it continues to get worse until the alcoholic seeks help. You can’t allow the disappointments and mistakes of the past affect your choices today, because circumstances have probably changed.

9. Enabling

Often, well-meaning loved ones, in trying to “help,” will actually do something that enables alcoholics to continue along their destructive paths. Find out what enabling is and make sure that you are not doing anything that bolsters the alcoholic’s denial or prevents them from facing the natural consequences of their actions. Many an alcoholic has finally reached out for help when they realized their enabling system was no longer in place.

10. Putting Off Getting Help

After years of covering up for the alcoholic and not talking about “the problem” outside the family, it may seem daunting to reach out for help from a support group such as Al-Anon Family Groups. But millions have found solutions that lead to serenity inside those meetings. Going to an Al-Anon meeting is one of those things that once you do it, you say, “I should have done this years ago!”

Look After Yourself

There may be very little you can do to help the alcoholic until he or she is ready to get help, but you can stop letting someone’s drinking problem dominate your thoughts and your life. It’s okay to make choices that are good for your physical and mental health.

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10 Things to Stop Doing If Your Loved One Is an Alcoholic

Flaredown – Decode Your Chronic Illness

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spookyautisticcombeferre:

empyreansea:

spookyjealous:

A simple, beautiful way to track your chronic illness.

HOLY FUCK SPOONIES LOOK AT THIS
29 DAYS LEFT LETS FUND THIS!

Flaredown is a web site and mobile app that lets your track your chronic illness and figure out triggers so you can reduce your flares before they ever begin.

It’s a spoonie-centric approach to figuring out what works. You can track your illness, and bring your data into your doctor. You can talk with other spoonies who have your condition and see what works for them. You can talk about drugs and see if the side effects are worth the benefits of medication.

it’s banding together in spite of illnesses that seek to isolate us.

it’s bringing light to symptoms that are not understood by doctors.

literally amazing

if you are not chronically ill/disabled and can spare the cash PLEASE fund this there literally are no symptom trackers out there (that I have found) that cater to people with chronic illness other than maybe crohn’s and there especially aren’t ones designed to connect the chronically ill and that is so important there is so much that even a great doctor can’t understand and the more you can connect to people with similar symptoms the better. I’m specifically addressing this to healthy people because those of us who need this most rarely have money to spare between treatments that may or may not help, testing and retesting, often being unable to work, lawyers fees for trying to get disability, special dietary needs (esp if those needs are considered a fad diet and the price gets jacked up and yes I am looking at you gluten-free stuff), assistive technology, transportation due to inability to drive, the list goes on but I’m going to stop here.

this app is so important and it is desperately needed bc seriously have you ever tried setting up a custom spreadsheet for this stuff it is hard as fuck and there aren’t templates for it and spreadsheets are less than ideal no matter how you set them up

Flaredown – Decode Your Chronic Illness

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trabasack:

Congrats to Joanna Grace who has written an instruction book for creating and telling sensory stories for children with special education needs or learning disabilities.

Sensory stories use sensory cues such as sounds, tastes, smells and things to hold and feel during the story to help connect to the experience and the message of the tale.

We supported her kickstarter to write the first stories and we are so glad to hear about the book which will help parents and teachers create their own story experiences.

More about the book and it’s launch here.

http://sensoryplaytray.com/sensory-stories-children-teens-book/

How to Survive a Health Crisis or Chronic Illness in Marriage | Reader’s Digest

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A medical crisis or lifelong health condition rewrites the script of your relationship. Your roles may change drastically. Your future doesn’t look the way you’d hoped. Sex, money, work, chores, fun — they’re all different now. “Managing the way an illness affects your marriage is just as important as keeping up with medications and doctor’s appointments and treatments,” Dr. Sotile says.

“Today, most illnesses aren’t short events. They’re processes that go on and on and on, possibly for the rest of your lives. And both of you will need different things at different times in the process. Couples who take responsibility for this can build stronger, closer marriages despite the presence of illness.”

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How to Survive a Health Crisis or Chronic Illness in Marriage | Reader’s Digest

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ms-demeanor:

I made a comic about what it feels like (to me) to cope with having an invisible illness and the judgements and accusations that sometimes come with invisible illnesses.

I did it in green ‘cause that’s the color of the Celiac Awareness ribbon Celiac is one of the “imaginary” “all in your head” “stupid” “hypochondriac” invisible illnesses I live with.

So here. Be nice to people in general, because it’s the right thing to do, but if you can’t at least do that then please don’t be an asshole when someone tells you that they have Lupus or Celiac or Fibromyalgia or any of the other things that we live with every day that you can’t see on the surface.

Cheers.

How to Overcome Emotional Numbness

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onlinecounsellingcollege:

Emotional numbness is where we experience mild to severe feelings of detachment – so it’s hard for us to access normal feelings any more. This includes both negative and positive emotions as you can’t decide to shut just one feeling off. Common causes of emotional numbness include different…

How to Overcome Emotional Numbness

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Neil Gaiman: ‘Terry Pratchett isn’t jolly. He’s angry’

Terry Pratchett may strike many as a twinkly old elf, but that’s not him at all. Fellow sci-fi novelist Neil Gaiman on the inner rage that drives his ailing friend’s writing … [read more] …

Terry Pratchett is not a jolly old elf at all. Not even close. He’s so much more than that. As Terry walks into the darkness much too soon, I find myself raging too: at the injustice that deprives us of – what? Another 20 or 30 books? Another shelf-full of ideas and glorious phrases and old friends and new, of stories in which people do what they really do best, which is use their heads to get themselves out of the trouble they got into by not thinking? Another book or two of journalism and agitprop? But truly, the loss of these things does not anger me as it should. It saddens me, but I, who have seen some of them being built close-up, understand that any Terry Pratchett book is a small miracle, and we already have more than might be reasonable, and it does not behoove any of us to be greedy.

I rage at the imminent loss of my friend. And I think, “What would Terry do with this anger?” Then I pick up my pen, and I start to write.

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Xena: See how calm the surface of the water is. That was me once. And then
[Xena throws a stone in the water]
Xena: , the water ripples and churns. That’s what I became.
Gabrielle: But if we sit here long enough it will go back to being still again; go back to being calm.
Xena: But the stone is still under there. It’s now part of the lake. It might look as it did before, but it’s forever changed.

Xena: Warrior Princess (via mywhitepanties)