Author: Seahurst Wellness in Education Center

Everyone has a dark side, but if you don’t encounter difficulty, you don’t usually know this about yourself. People who lack compassion, in my experience, either forget that they have a dark side, or they are living from this dark side and can’t even begin to see the light that would be possible if they went into therapy, exercised and, perhaps, humbled themselves to the Lord.

Are you willing to be mentored by experienced Christians? Are you willing to share your weaknesses and be held accountable by peers in the faith? Are you willing to face your dark side?

Often, we try to avoid making people think poorly of us. But what if we’ve already started to slide in that direction?

If we think people think poorly of us, then typically we will either be defiant and consider ourselves “oppressed” (even if we’re the ones being problematic), or… we may become the “bad” person people think we are. We will act out their expectations of us because we see ourselves only how they see us. This is very true if we don’t have a strong sense of self. Which is why, if you’re really struggling, it is important to surround yourself with loving, non-judgmental people.

Another thing can happen: we sometimes imagine that others think poorly of us when really they’ve already moved on! Don’t forget that this might also be the case!

My neighbor, when I was telling her I was starting this blog, told me to put a list of people’s names whose opinion actually matters to me because it was a given that some people would probably judge me and write me off and I needed to have that list ready so I could keep my priorities straight and my ministry active in the face of rejection. Man am I glad I did that! This way I can follow God’s guidance rather than my desire for approval. This way I can write with raw honesty and minister from pain, but also from the perspective of my recovery.

Christian faith illumines our way out like nothing else does:

If we continue to look outside of ourselves for approval and find rejection, we despair without Christ who reminds us that we are strongest when we learn from our weaknesses and lean on him. We must ask Christ to give us our identity and not our job; our goodness to our fellow humans in spite their rejection of us, and not our popularity.

We must stop looking horizontally, which means focusing on the people around us who we imagine judging us, and instead look vertically, upward to God and then, through him, go on to the work that we are called to do. I think a lot of school and workplace shootings happen when people look horizontally and obsess over where they stand in relationship to society rather than upward to their relationship to themselves, their God, and their consciences. We are to dig down deeper into God in our peril and forget the ways of the world, our reputations and what the world thinks of us. And act justly even, actually especially, when people expect otherwise.

This does not work if we become reckless with our relationships and with the feelings of others or if we simply say, “The world has rejected me, and they rejected Christ. Therefore, I am like Christ and am Christian. ”

Just because you’re rejected doesn’t make you like Christ. Being harmless in the face of oppression, rejection and harm posed by others, even our very friends, makes us like Christ.

We must genuinely seek to make ourselves a living sacrifice through studying our Bible, going to church, and reflecting about how we can improve and taking appropriate action to get there. And by praying for divine aid.

St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

May it be so. Amen.

“Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” – Romans 12:12

Part 1: Masked Life – What I lost…

What do I tell myself when my face is a mask?

I tell myself that I am still me and that my soul still shines from within my body, even if its center is now the heart and not the eyes. Even if my eyes cannot sparkle and the wrinkles around my eyes do not respond immediately to the interactions I have on a day to day basis, I remind myself that I am still me, that my heart is full of love and compassion and I that I still matter to God.

Being on antipsychotics is hard. Everyone is different and so I merely share my own experience:

It changes your whole personality and you only very slowly learn how to accept the fact that you cannot command the room the way you did when you were hyper, sparky and sparkly. Your feet drag, your face doesn’t move except with great effort. Conversations lose their immediacy and you feel less persuasive. You flex your jaw, even when you’re not chewing. Your tongue moves. You are in a fog.

“You look over-medicated, Erin,” an abrasive colleague once shouted across the office at the school where I was working. I had confided in a different colleague that I was on medication and this was how I learned that everyone now knew this about me.

But I was numb from my medicine and so this didn’t even sting.

I lost my glimmer as a motivational speaker and high-impact teacher. My relationships with my students became strained. And eventually, I had to leave the teaching profession because I had lost the love and effortlessness of teaching.

Part 2: Thriving Anyway – What I gained…

Trust of others, because I was not volatile.

Confidence, because I was perceiving reality accurately.

Community, because I had the ability to make appointments because I could trust that I would keep them and that I would be well for them.

Safety. Because I felt safe and was safe.

The ability to trust myself. Self-reliance.

Feeling safe and secure.

Employment. Continued employment.

The relief of my husband who could finally relax.

Continuity. My life narrative.

My parents, with whom I had stopped talking because I had imagined all sorts of things that hadn’t really happened in my childhood and was angry at them.

Resolve. I read Elyn Saks’ The Center Will Not Hold about her persistence in the face of a severe case of schizophrenia and took heart that she had survived and that that meant that I could, too. And through this, too, I found … community. A more authentic community than I had ever known. The knowledge that many are on antipsychotics and live fully functioning lives, and the pride in knowing that some of us even have prestigious careers.

Finally

What will I tell myself if my face is a mask again?

I will tell myself that this is what keeps me alive, but that I won’t need to be on this much forever.

A Word About Today

I have no psychosis and haven’t for a while. But I personally will always be on a low dose of mine. I’m on a fourth of what I was on when I was in crisis.

Why would I ever risk going off of it completely? My trick: take it one day at a time.

There are so many things that helped me get better. And the most important one was the belief that I could get better and the willingness to try many things. Never give up. No matter how hard you’ve fallen. God and his angels are with you.

Everyone’s path to recovery is different, and it is the shape of a spiral rather than a line, with moments of stumbling or utter collapse along the way – and we must be patient while committing ourselves to the journey.

A word about this process comes to mind from the book The Courage to Heal, where the authors observe that mature recovery means that you recognize that you can take breaks from the recovery process. Where you can see yourself as struggling, be at peace with yourself about it, and go on and have a great day anyway.

We are all works in progress and at a certain point I just gave it to God and stopped trying to fix myself. That’s how I got better. But I had to put in a lot of elbow grease first. I had to go to therapy and analyze my faults and see how I was being disruptive, but then I also got to the point where I was like, okay, I’ll never be perfect, I’m not harming anyone, and I can just stop trying to become perfect.

Trust the process and have faith in God’s help (when you feel well enough to see that God might, just might, be with you even in the extremity of your suffering – and this is not always possible).

Try to remember that God will “command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways…” – Psalm 91:11. And that you are not alone.

“What a relief to finally have a name for my suffering!”

Few who receive a stigmatizing mental health diagnosis utter these words. A bad diagnosis can make what seemed like just a really bad summer a never-ending life-long sentence of despair. If this applies to you, take heart! This does not have to be the case! Diagnoses, though helpful, cause harm unless you frame them differently than most doctors will. Read on to hear what I did to bring healing and hope back to my life in spite of my diagnosis.

It has been said that the body achieves what the mind believes. Our minds are incredibly powerful and they shape our reality and our futures, sometimes even down to what illnesses we get. We don’t just think our way into mental illness, of course, but don’t forget that people can make dramatic improvements in their daily functioning and quality of life just by changing their thought patterns. And so we could also say that the mind achieves what it believes about itself.

Clearing harmful religious structures from my life in favor of a hope-filled Christianity healed me partially. The other essential change was ignoring books and scholarship describing my illness and what this meant about myself and my life trajectory. This was transformational.

Labels are permanent, and mental illness is sometimes, though by no means always, permanent. Research is not bad and reading scholarship is not bad, perhaps, so long as one takes it with a grain of salt. In general I don’t recommend it.

What makes mental illness permanent? Not staying in treatment. Abusing drugs and alcohol. The first step is to acknowledge that you are greatly reducing your likelihood of a good life by being reckless and wishy-washy about treatment. Assuming you’re being careful, what else makes serious mental illness permanent?

Reducing yourself to a label and seeing yourself as nothing more than a label and a set of symptoms that will always be there until you die.

Mental illnesses can last a life time, and in bad cases we probably need to stay on medicine, but we cannot leave it at that. As soon as we frame mental illness as permanent, we’re doomed to stagnate….or get worse!

As people, we read books or watch movies about life all the time. Eventually we can’t tell if we are experiencing life the way we are because the book we’ve read changed us, or because the the movie was so accurate that it captured us perfectly! Diagnoses are like books about ourselves. Once we have them, it means we have found something that describes a part of us perfectly. But unfortunately we then may let them define us completely. And our mind achieves what it believes about itself. The illness becomes permanent.

Once we have a mental health diagnosis and agree with it, then we know what we are to move away from. It is not that we have a container to hold us permanently. No! Instead think of it this way: we have a direction. A goal: lasting stability. Maybe even a full recovery! A diagnosis is a sign that we must do things that move us out of this symptom cluster. In other words, a motion away from our illness.

Above all, never give up hope that you will get better!

If you have a doctor who says you’re only going to get worse, and who doesn’t listen to you when you say you want to keep things positive, get a different doctor! Negativity is poison for your brain. Obviously if you’re trying to get off of a mood-stabilizer (like Lithium or Lamictal) and you are bipolar, you probably shouldn’t go off of it. I would not trust a doctor if they told me I did not need the medicine I take because I know that this is what keeps me high-functioning. But if a doctor paints an overarching doom and gloom picture, get a second opinion.

I will conclude with an example of my own experience:

I once had a doctor who said in my first visit that I was on a low dose of what I was on and that, even though I was doing great, I could expect to double it within the next year! And then continue to go up on it. This is a bad sign! Turns out she had been an emergency room doctor and was used to people in absolute crisis. It was her first year in private practice. She gave me the right medicine change, but I quickly got a different doctor.

We must find doctors who have realism – who don’t just tell us to go off our meds – paired with hope and optimism. Labels and diagnoses frequently take away our ability to see that our suffering might not be permanent. And therefore labels can make the mind achieve the doom that doctors tell us about and that we most fear.