Self-Mastery: The Key To Functioning With Mental Illness

Self-mastery in regards to mental illness or disorders means that we no longer suffer from our 'disorders' and our able to live and function with our ability to experience life in a wide range of experiences. There is no cure for our illnesses and according to The Washington Post: Psychiatry's Failed Paradigm- there has not been empirical evidence in our genes that pinpoint likelihood of psychiatric illnesses. Perhaps they may one day find those genes but as of right now there is no agreed upon genetic evidence that our genes are involved. Whether or not we find it in our genes the point is the current psychiatric paradigm of treatment is not working. There is something missing.

I recently came upon some videos from Bipolar Advantage that explain we can live with a mental disorder, function, and as shocking and presumptuous as this sounds enjoy our "illness" and use it to our advantage. Many of you I know will have resistance to this idea, perhaps it brings anger to you, but I ask you to listen for just a moment. Let me start by using their diagram so you can get a visual of what I am proposing. 

The crisis area on the left shows spikes. These spikes from a bipolar perspective (can be interpreted to any illness but for the sake of a point I will refer to bipolar for now) show the highest highs and the lowest lows. They represent the flow of information and experience and the red area means we are uncomfortable and in a crisis mode, "I am freaking Out!" 

The current psychiatric paradigm's treatment goal is to get you and keep you in the recovery and managed zones. In the recovery zone you see that the spikes are level and stable within the blue zone. If we travel outside this blue comfort zone to the managed zone it's time to re-adjust our medications and use tools to get us back to the recovery zone. However, as the presenter Tom Wooten explained in the managed and recovery zones we are ,"One bad nights sleep away from an episode." I have been here in this reality most of my life! Elaborating on this, when we live in the recovery zone we are living life very carefully. We are not permitting ourselves to experiencing life fully. Life is dull and boring.

On the right side of the diagram we have a person with bipolar who has started expanding their comfort zone. Through trial and error and with resources and tools they move one step into the yellow zone and step back. The idea is the more you consciously and mindfully challenge your comfort zones you will soon realize you grow comfortable functioning in that level of experience and the flow of information. So a bipolar person can grow comfortable to be in a full blown mania or a deep depression. That is why they labeled it the freedom, stability, self-mastery zones. 

“Beyond Recovery, we enter the Freedom Stage where we begin to break free of the cycle of Crisis and Recovery. From there we graduate to Stability Stage and eventually achieve Self-Mastery. It will take slow and careful work with some set backs, but we will find ourselves comfortable and in control while experiencing increased flow of energy and information. States that previously created great disturbance and needed some form of intervention in the Managed Stage are now within our comfort zone.

Real Stability means to maintain control in an ever wider range of experience. Some of us can even achieve stability across the entire range of the bipolar condition and live an extraordinary life.

Self-Mastery is when we choose how to react to every stimulus. The stimulus can be internal or external, real or not, but the important thing is that we can make a conscious choice about how to act.” -Tom Wooten Bipolar Advantage

I am not promoting their system or selling anything. I haven't been through their program. However, I have achieved exactly what they teach others, self-mastery. I have hallucinations, obsessive thinking, depression, mania, psychosis, anxiety, and I am still functioning, I laugh every single day and enjoy the range of energy and experience my illnesses have to offer. I still don't enjoy the anxiety though, but I am working on that! However, our current system of treating illness, the stigma, our perceptions, need to be challenged. It needs to change. If we start with ourselves, if we adapt to our minds way of dealing with stimuli then the future for mental health and well-being looks very promising! 

You must perceive your “disorder” as an advantage and an assets rather than a limitation like I previously talked about which you can find here in part 1 and part 2. Perhaps this is contradictory. However, like my previous post I state that yes, having a mental illness can have limitations but you can learn to accommodate them. When you begin accommodating your limitations you start to expand your comfort zone. You train your mind to see the positive in a once negative experience.

Think of this, your being treated by a psychiatrist and the goal is to reduce or eliminate your symptoms. No matter what medication you take (at least in most cases I have seen or in my experience) there is always going to be a relapse of symptoms, some unresolved symptoms in which the current action is to adjust medication. What happens when you are trying to eliminate symptoms and you start having a symptom? Say you start feeling depressed, you become uncomfortable, you want that feeling to Go AWAY! That just makes it that much more uncomfortable and debilitating.

What if say your schizophrenic you have learned the difference between hallucinations and reality. You see a person sitting at the dinner table with you and you ask your spouse,”Hey, do you see someone sitting there?” The spouse responds, “No.” You know then that is a hallucination, you can shrug your shoulders and ignore it or you can actually interact with it knowing it is just your mind. You are comfortable with it. It doesn't bother you. How absolutely free that must feel!

In an interview with Lloyd Ross, PhD, he explained that recovery from schizophrenia is possible without medication. Mr. Ross gives an example of a case where his patients main complaint was of hearing voices. He did not anticipate what would happen next. His patient heard over and over again,"Kill, kill, kill," and explained she lived with her mother. He was curious to have a session with the mother alone and then bring the daughter in afterwards. Mr. Ross upon meeting his patients mother was immediately put off. She was difficult and nasty. Mr. Ross brought the daughter back and and made the comment,"I am sorry but I must be honest, I do not like her and I kept picturing strangling the women!" The patient looked at him a bit shocked and a realization came to her, "I get why I hear kill, kill, kill, I realize it's my mother I want to kill!" Mr. Ross was surprised and they focused the proceeding sessions on understanding the patients difficulties with the mother. The voices went away. Mr. Ross was very surprised at the unexpected outcome. 

Let's say you have horrid social anxiety, how would you accommodate going grocery shopping? Avoid it would be the first instinct but that is not feasible for most of us. My accommodation for bad days is I make a list and me and the list are all that exist in the store, weird I know. I feel comfort with the piece of paper, it's like a map in my hand! Another accommodation would be to go with a friend on small social ventures and focus only on keeping up a good conversation, something that draws your attention away from your fear of social situations. Or music. Put headphones on and blast music and keep to the beat.

Taking small steps and trying to do things differently actually broadens your comfort zone. If you found a method or accommodation that works to ease your discomfort or stress the more you utilize it and manage it to still accomplish your tasks the more it will not bother you. Again, social anxiety for me and shopping I will be honest, I talk to myself. Not loud but I mumble to myself. I don't care! I do it to keep myself focused and I actually say really funny things that lighten my mood. The task is to shop. I am not there to impress others or make friends so I really don't care what others think of me.

From Flickr by Heathre

Finding Value In Your Experiences

Those of us with mental illness interpret the flow of life's experiences differently than others. It doesn't need to be a bad thing. It takes a lot of self awareness and honesty to understand how our minds work and interpret our environment in a manageable and meaningful way. It is possible. One way is to find value in our experiences. Like the women who heard angry voices telling her to 'kill' she found value when she understood why. She needed to realize her mother was driving her nuts! Her solutions could have been to express her distress to her mother, talk to someone else and learn new ways of coping with her mothers nasty behavior, or like I have done with quiet a few people in my life get away from them! 

We all wish we could handle life like everyone else. The truth is we can't. Our brains are not hardwired that way. Society doesn't make it alright either. Medication can help but therapy and self-awareness are the only ways to bring lasting changes. Imagine a world where hallucinations were appropriate and valuable ways of interpreting the environment. Like Tom Wooten explained in his video he loves his hallucinations because they are valuable. He explained that his mother went through a major health crisis and he had a hallucination of himself jumping in front of a bus, dying and transporting into his wife who was beside him. While inside her he had a realization of an important emotional aspect of his mothers health crisis and close death that he hadn't realized. Since he found value in his experience he found he was better able to cope with his mothers health. 

The key to be able to find meaning from our experiences is to become comfortable with them in the first place. If Tom Wooten was not comfortable with having a hallucination he would of panicked and found the experience as scary, bad, and overwhelming. Just like many people find meaningful information in their dreams, our experiences can also bring us value. 

I don't want to be ashamed of having a 'bipolar' or 'schizophrenic' label. I don't want to be embarrassed or less of a valuable honorable human being. I don't want my interpretation of the world around me to be invalid and insane. I want to enjoy the spectrum of experiences I can have having these illnesses. I have. I also haven't. However, the more I master myself and my mind and accept that which I cannot change the happier I am. The more freedom I feel and experience. The more I contribute and give to the world.

Resources: 

• Washington Post: Psychiatry's failed Paradigm  http://voices.washingtonpost.com/shortstack/2010/01/rcent_decades_have_seen_dramat.html
• Bipolar Advantage: The Shocking Truth About Recovery From Bipolar Disorder  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe1SFteLGDI (note: there are several videos that cover the entire concept; search under Bipolar Advantage)
• Bipolar Advantage main website http://www.bipolaradvantage.com/index.php
• Daniel Mackler's interview with Lloyd Ross, PhD Recovery from Schizophrenia Without Medication http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyL0jjI93OI 

Understanding Limitations: Accommodating Disability

Clarifying What Disability Means: Understanding Your Limits

In the previous post we discussed mental and physical disability and what happens emotionally and mentally when you realize you cannot live as you once did. I got a few comments with distress about the use of the word 'disability'. This is a stigmatized word. Saying someone is disabled is almost an insult to some. Just like how the word retarded used to be degrading, now we use mentally challenged. I have even heard preferences towards physical disability's being called physical impairments. The word doesn't really matter so much as the meaning behind it that is the key, limits. Like it or not whether you have a physical illness or mental illness you are surely limited in daily activities, personal affairs, social situations, etc. This means there is just some things you can't do anymore or you can't do sometimes. A disability doesn't have to be permanent.

For example if I have anxiety and I have to take a test most likely I will not do well as compared to if I was calm. How well can you do certain tasks when your minds in total meltdown? Probably not as well as when your mind is calm and organized. This is what I mean about disability. With this as I mentioned in the previous post this causes frustration within ourselves. Anger, resentment, and frustration at our inability to cope with situations, do our jobs well, or communicate with our loved ones effectively. I am sure some of you have seen this in yourselves, where once you were the go to person that could multi-task and get things done, now your mind gets so overwhelmed you can't think straight and you end up not doing most of the stuff on your to do list. You as a person have changed, right now, or for periods of time you are unable to do what you once did. This leads to feelings associated with loss of identity and lowered self-esteem.

From my experience and from what I have observed in others I find that without the conscience acceptance of our limits with mental and even physical disability the more prone we are to relapse and fall off the proverbial horse and hit the ground hard! This is what I saw with my unwillingness to accept I had a mental illness. I lived a way that was detrimental to my health because I viewed myself as perfectly capable, rational, and took on things that led to the demise of a good chunk of my life. If I were to have realized my strengths and weaknesses perhaps I would of handled things differently. 

When disability or illness hits we have to change how we live. We have to asses within ourselves what we can't do and can do. On an earlier forum today dealing with physical illness a women posted,”We cannot think about what we can't do but rather what we can.”

Accommodation for our needs is the key element to turning a can't into a can. An example I can give you is I have a very hard time grocery shopping. I have a horrid memory and easily get confused and disoriented. So to accommodate my mental meltdown in the grocery store I make a list of everything I need. I go as far as taking a pen with me and I carefully mark off every item I put in the basket. The pen is a life saver! Without it I get just as confused and disoriented. I am the women in the store clutching the white paper in one hand a pen in the other looking around intently hunting down her sought after items! -I am very aware I look like a mad women, that's okay though I get my shopping done.

I have seen a lot written about accommodating illness and disability’s in the work place and school but not for our day to day lives. These are important as well but if we have trouble doing simple daily tasks like cleaning the house and caring for our children and spouses it is a huge blow to our self esteem and confidence.

This is where I get back to the basics of what this blog is all about, it's simple yet profound, mindfulness. Mindfulness is being the observer of ourselves and our environment and I go into more depth in it here. Becoming mindful of ourselves, our needs, and what our environment expects from us we can begin to formulate a plan to accommodate our limitations.

Disability and limitations doesn't mean you necessarily can't do something you just have to do it differently. That is how and why your unique, you become a mindful warrior, taking limitations and becoming limitless. I know this may sound like some sort of self help blurb right now but it's true.

Tips and Considerations: Managing Illness

First, if you are not already aware ask yourself honestly what you can and can't do. What tasks trigger stress, what tasks or situations are difficult to manage, what 'could' you do but are unable to now?

Tackle certain tasks at the right time of day. Ask yourself when you have the most energy and use that time to tackle more difficult tasks.

Take time or schedule time to relax. Do something you enjoy. Struggling with mental illness and the rainbow of difficulties it presents can be exhausting, like someone with a heart condition you need to take a breather.

Experiment! Try new ways of doing things.

Write down tasks or situations that send your mind into chaos and create new ways of handling them. A simple example that comes to mind is I have a heck of a time folding laundry. I get frustrated quick, however, I have found a new way to accomplish it and have fun! Seriously I did. I watch YouTube videos on my computer, now it's my secret time to kick back and relax.

I honestly can admit I have had a problem doing everything under the sun. My fix all solution is I meditate while I do things. Which means I focus on my senses, my breathe, what I see, feel, hear, smell. I become detached from the outcome of the task, I enjoy tasks that at one time drove me nuts, and every task can be refreshing and enjoyable.

This list is difficult for me to explain to you because everyone has different difficulties and I can only convey what I have done to turn limitations into do able feats. The most valuable tip I can offer is be creative. You have the power to be successful and to live everyday joyfully and overcome your limits. You may live differently than 'the norm' but the point is your living.