How I Cope With Loneliness

Posted on by Astrid

Today in her Sunday Poser, Sadje asks us about loneliness. She describes the experience as the feeling she gets when her family or friends can’t celebrate something important (such as the seasonal holidays) with her. This is one aspect of loneliness indeed. I feel lonely, left out even, knowing that my sister will be celebrating St. Nicholas with my parents next week and I haven’t been invited. Okay, she has a child for whom this holiday is more meaningful than it should be for me as an adult. Still, I am reminded of the last year we celebrated St. Nicholas with my family, or rather, the first year we didn’t. That was because of me: I had been admitted to the mental hospital shortly before and my parents didn’t want the hassle of having to watch me while I was on leave, so at first they suggested they celebrate the occasion without me. That year, my sister refused and the celebration didn’t go forward at all. Now that my sister has a child, there’s no way she’s going to care about whether I’ll be included or not. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’d rather have me excluded.

Loneliness, however, can take other forms too. Like I mentioned last month, loneliness comes from within a lot of the time. That’s why you can feel lonely when you’re surrounded by people. I often felt this way in the high school cafeteria.

I find that what helps me cope with loneliness is to surround myself with positive influences, both in the form of people and activities. I mean, I could dwell on my family’s rejection of me, but I do have a loving husband and loving in-laws. I also have caring staff and nice fellow clients, some of whom I consider friends.

It also helps me to engage in fulfilling hobbies, such as writing, reading and crafts. Through my blog and Facebook groups, I feel a genuine sense of connection to the outside world. Reading helps me escape my problems, including my sense of isolation. Crafts distract me and help me feel that I can be productive in a way. All of these help me overcome my sense of loneliness.

How do you deal with loneliness?

How I Deal With Anger

Posted on by Astrid

In today’s Sunday Poser, Sadje asks us what we do when we get angry. She seems to mean this question in two ways: firstly, how we express our anger and secondly, how we cope with it and calm down again.

I have always been relatively quick to anger. Particularly, my tolerance for frustration and distress is very low and I tend to express this as anger. During such episodes of distress, I may scream, yell, slam doors, etc. Over the past year, I’ve even occasionally shown slight physical aggression towards people.

To cope with this type of anger, my best strategy is to enlist the help of others to get me to think through whatever was causing me frustration or distress and/or to help me solve the problem. Usually, temporarily removing myself from the situation might help a tiny bit, but it will not help in the long run, as it will not get rid of the source of frustration.

Then there are these situations in which I’m angry because someone is being unjust towards me. When I am angry at being treated unjustly, similarly, removing myself will help for a while, but not in the long run. Assertiveness can help in that it allows me to properly voice my needs, wants and rights. I am still working on this, in that I tend too often to avoid properly advocating for myself and instead resort to less helpful ways of making it clear that I’m struggling.

When there is nothing I can do about the anger or its source at a given moment, what helps me is to safely express it, such as by hitting a pillow. I also used to sing certain songs that spoke to me. For example, there is a Dutch song called “Laat me” (“Leave me”) that I would always sing at music club when I was irritated at my treatment team in the mental hospital back in the early years. Now, hitting a pillow and screaming has the same effect.

After I recover from my anger outbursts, I do like to talk through what was causing them, whether I can solve the problem at hand or not. I, after all, find that other emotions are often masked as anger, such as shame, sadness or fear. By talking through my anger after safely having expressed it, I can often get to the bottom of what is troubling me.

How do you cope with anger?

Ways of Finding Inner Peace #31Days2021 #Blogtober21

Posted on by Astrid

Yay, another post today in honor of #31Days2021 and #Blogtober21! The optional day 3 prompt in the 31-day writing challenge is “Peace”. I have been very much on edge over the past couple of days, so I really could be using a sense of inner peace right now. I am not too inspired to write, especially about finding peace. To get some ideas, I reread my list of activities that give me inner peace, which I wrote about three years ago.

The activities could be divided into several categories. Some are spiritual in nature, such as meditation. I wasn’t a Christian at the time, so I’d put prayer and Bible reading in this place now.

Others are physical, such as walking or exercise. I honestly didn’t think of exercise as an activity to give me inner peace right now.

Then there are the sensory activities. I have a lot more of those available to me right now than I had back in 2018. For example, now that I have a music pillow, I can not just listen to soothing music with headphones on or through speakers in my room, but through speakers integrated into my pillow. In addition, I obviously have my essential oil diffuser and my weighted blanket now, as well as still having my sensory cat soft toy and several other stuffed animals. I can almost create a sensory room in my own bedroom.

Writing is an activity that still helps me. So does talking to my staff. When I struggle with worries, writing them out just for myself, will not usually be enough, but sending an E-mail to my staff is.

Lastly, there are of course mental strategies for dealing with distress, such as radical acceptance, opposite-acting or “worry time”. Unfortunately, I haven’t found many cognitive approaches to finding inner peace helpful at all.

What strategies or activities help you find inner peace?

How I Cope With Stress

Posted on by Astrid

Today in her Sunday Poser, Sadje asks how we cope with stress. We all face stress in our lives, yes, even the most laid-back people out there. Maybe they’ve just found better ways of coping with it.

I for one find that a major stressor for me is frustration with my disabilities. For this reason, it may be that my parents thought I was very laid-back until I became aware of my blindness when I was around seven. Now, frustration in general, such as with failing technology, can set me off, but really so can frustrations when trying to accomplish something.

So how do I cope? Over the years, I’ve found several ways to ride the waves of frustration. Dialectical behavior therapy and in particular the ACCEPTS skill set has helped.

I find that distracting myself by focusing on something other than the frustrating situation or thing helps. This is hard with my autistic tendency to perseverate. For example, when I get frustrated with a polymer clay project, it’s currently hard to let go and focus on something else. But it is necessary. This is why my staff encourage me to take regular breaks and also do other activities, such as walking, besides polymer clay.

I also find that talking through my problems sometimes helps. Then, I may realize I’m catastrophizing or using other cognitive distortions. Often though, to get rid of a stressor, I need someone to take over part of the problem, or all of it, from me. After all, my problem-solving skills are practically nonexistent.

Other things I do to cope with stress include finding relaxing activities, such as diffusing an essential oil blend or lying under my weighted blanket. Lastly, writing about my stressors, problems or frustrations also helps.

What helps you cope with stress?

What Recovery Means to Me

Posted on by Astrid

Yesterday, one of the daily word prompts here on WP was Recovery. I didn’t see it till it was already time for me to go to bed, so I’m writing about this word today. Today, I am sharing with you what recovery from my mental health conditions means to me.

First, there are a few things recovery doesn’t mean to me. Recovery isn’t the same as being happy all the time – that’d be an unrealistic goal. It also isn’t the same as independence. I don’t intend on ever living independently again and there are few things with respect to life skills I’d really still want to learn.

Recovery does mean no longer being scared when I’m able to do something independently. Currently, I constantly expect people to overestimate my abilities, so when I can do something independently, I think people will expect me to do it all the time.

Similarly, recovery means no longer being afraid of my feelings, both good and bad. Affect phobia is a thing, you know? I currently tend to dissociate from my feelings a lot. I also often counter joy or sadness with anger, because that’s the easiest emotion for me to express.

Recovery means having a relatively stable sense of self. I don’t necessarily want to integrate all alternate parts of my personality, although it’s okay if it happens spontaneously. We do want to achieve cooperation among ourselves. This also means being able to accept the seemingly opposite sides of me.

Recovery means, as a result of the above, no longer needing to rely on negative coping strategies such as self-harm, rage or impulsive behavior. I will no doubt still have times when I indulge into an unhealthy habit such as overeating or buying stuff I don’t need. That’s okay, since I don’t think total self-control is a realistic goal. I just don’t want to use these as coping skills when feeling overwhelmed, and I no longer want to engage in self-harm at all.

Lastly, recovery means no longer expecting people to abandon me if they know the real me. Currently, I have such a negative self-image that I believe any positive aspects of me are a façade and at the core I’m so wicked no-one should want to be associated with me. Overcoming this is probably the hardest thing to achieve, as expectation of abandonment is such an ingrained thought pattern. I really hope to someday stop seeing myself as one giant manipulator though.

In addition to the word prompt, I am linking up with #LifeThisWeek and #SeniSal.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (October 11, 2020)

Posted on by Astrid

It’s Sunday and I’m in definite need of some coffee. For this reason, I’m joining in with #WeekendCoffeeShare. It’s not time for my evening coffee yet, but maybe I can enjoy a virtual cuppa.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that the weather is gloomy. It’s been raining almost the entire day and it’s cold enough that I could use my winter coat.

If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I’m struggling quite a bit. Yesterday I landed in crisis. I didn’t sleep all night and was still feeling very tense by this morning. A walk didn’t even help, because I felt cold and was very tired and overloaded.

I am also struggling with what to tell my husband. The crisis was quite bad and I really want to be open to my husband. However, I fear he’s going to be angry with me for it, because in other places, this could’ve led to me being kicked out. In fact, I’m still worried that the staff are going to decide to kick me out after all.

It makes me feel sad that I, being of above-average IQ, am expected to make my own decisions regarding this stuff and make sure my family is informed.

I mean, of course it has its pros that I’m intelligent. If I had an intellectual disability, I wouldn’t be able to blog, for instance. I also wouldn’t have my husband. However, this discrepancy between my IQ and my ability to cope emotionally, is weighing me down quite a bit.

If we were having coffee, I would tell you that, as unlikely as it may seem now, the rest of the week was pretty good. I made some soap and experimented with baking soda modeling clay. I removed some of the figures from their molds today, but I think they hadn’t fully hardened, as they were still pretty brittle.

If we were having coffee, I would share that I’ve been loving browsing Amazon’s Kindle collection for books to get. I don’t want to buy them yet, but I did download a few free books.

I also finally got Listify on Apple Books. This is a book of journaling prompts (yes, again!) but most are list-based.

What have you been up to lately?