Mind Inflicted

Perfectionism is something I struggle with a lot so it has been destroying me inside a little that my recent quotes I have made have been lower in quality.
I know it doesn't even matter but every time I look at them I want to delete them.
It's because I've been making them on the computer instead of my phone and FB stretches them out until you click on them.
I do tend to ignore the problem instead of working on trying to eradicate or reduce my perfectionism issue by not looking at the page and pretending it doesn't exist.
I think my need for everything to be perfect has stemmed from feeling like I have no real control over my life so I become extra controlling with the things I can control.
It is like some kind of ritual where if I get everything perfect then I won't feel like a failure or it will make up for all the things I do fail at. It is almost like this is me trying to balance things out to make everything even.
Which could also be connected to my obsession with even numbers.
Although I do not like odd numbers and require perfection, I tend to work better in chaos and find it therapeutic to organise the chaos.
Sometimes you do not believe a lot of things are connected to one other until you actually think about it and join the invisible dots.

-Mi

“Change what you can, manage what you can’t.”
- Raymond McCauley

“Mental health affects every aspect of your life. It’s not just this neat little issue you can put into a box.”

I keep seeing comments by people claiming that if someone had experienced trauma they would remember it and that if they don't remember it, it didn't happen or it is an indication they are lying.

This is completely false.

For starters the big culprits of memory issues regarding trauma are dissociation, suppression and repression.

Dissociation is a detachment from things. When you have dissociation, you may forget things or have gaps in your memory.
Suppression is shutting down parts of the brain that are involved in recall.
Repression is memories that have been unconsciously blocked due to the memory being associated with a high level of stress or trauma.

The reality is trauma affects everyone differently and no one experience is the same as the next and it is incredibly harmful to other trauma survivors for anyone to dictate how someone that has experienced trauma should behave and remember things.

In my own personal experience, I can remember some things that might seem completely irrelevant to what happened. I am sure I am not the only one. Some people could probably have some adverse reaction to the colour red because they remember something being red during their traumatic experience. I do not believe it would be unusual for someone to remember the weather, what the floor looked liked, what they were wearing, an animal noise in the background but not remember clearly every single detail of what happened to them directly.

I think people forget that their comments online are public and people that have experienced trauma are reading these comments and feeling shame, guilt and wondering if all these people would accuse them of lying too.

I'm not saying people can't have an opinion, but I do believe that if you are about to respond to something that could have a negative impact on certain people reading your comments, you should probably do some reading on the topic first instead of posting a biased assumption.

The only people adding to the stigma of mental illness and disorders are the people that do not bother learning about things to form an educated opinion and a lack of understanding and interest in other peoples personal experiences.

One way we can help end the stigma is to be more mindful of the things we say in a public setting and speak about our own experiences (as difficult as that may be) to let other people know they are not alone and that there are multiple different experiences and not just one.

-Mi

For further reading.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150817132325.htm
https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/how-trauma-dissociation-disrupt-your-ability-form-memories-0403197
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/251655
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/what-trying-to-suppress-unwanted-memories-does-to-your-brain

“You don’t need to find a lesson in your trauma.”
- Jordan Pickell

"'Positive vibes only' isn't a thing. Humans have a wide range of emotions and that's OK."
-Molly Bahr

I've recently had to unfollow a bunch of pages claiming to be support and education places for mental health and mental illness because of their postings of things related to the depp/heard case.

People that run pages dedicated to eliminating stigma against mental illness should not be posting personal opinions on cases that they are only witnessing through the media and if you want to it should be done as unbiasedly and detached as possible.

The only way anyone on such pages should be talking about it is by not mentioning it and using this time to promote the importance of seeking support and combating mental health.

Mental health plays such an important role in every day functioning and how you interact with others. People that have unchecked mental health issues can have very destructive behaviours, not only towards themselves but to those around them. This isn't making excuses or blaming mental illness and I think anyone that comes to the conclusion that it is are the prime example of why removing stigma is so important.

We should not be using this time to tell people how horrible certain people are, we should not be laughing or making fun of toxic behaviours, we should not be saying that some forms of toxic behaviours are better to have than others, we should not be calling anyone names that people who have mental illness have been hearing most of their lives.

Language is also important and it disgusts me when mental health support pages use terminology like 'crazy', 'deranged', 'insane' to describe someone else's mental health struggles.

Your support for mental illness shouldn't be based on whether you like or dislike someone or something. Mental illness is not always pretty, it's not sunshine rose cakes. Mental illness can be dirty, messy, unpredictable, hurtful. It can make someone do things they wouldn't normally do and sometimes people cannot control what they do.

This is why open, supportive and educational discussion is so important.

You don't want to accidentally shame someone into never getting help or coming forward.

If you don't support all, take support out of your name.

-Mi

"You don't have to struggle in silence. You can be un-silent. You can live well with a mental health condition, as long as you open up to somebody about it."
- Demi Lovato

I've experienced this quite a lot in my life time and feel like this is where part of my self esteem issues come from. It is probably what has made me unwilling to seek help whenever I need it because I now view myself as needy, weak and annoying.

Was taught this again today when needing help to not feel alone with terrible thoughts and the other person got angry and annoyed. I felt like it reinforced my inner feelings that I am worthless and too much for everyone which in turn increased the horrible thoughts I was having.

I felt ashamed and still do. I feel ashamed even writing this now, thinking I should just disappear instead.

It is hard bringing this up with people because they will say that they say nice things and validate me while ignoring the times that they decided to invalidate me at times when I needed someone the most.

-Mi

"Emotional invalidation is the act of rejecting, dismissing, or minimizing someone else's thoughts and feelings. It implies that a person's experience is not important, wrong, or unacceptable.

Not only does it create emotional distance, conflict, violence, and disruption in relationships, but the recipient of emotional invalidation can feel alienated, confused, inferior, worthless, and problematic."

https://www.regain.us/advice/psychology/what-is-psychological-invalidation-how-it-happens-and-its-effects/

What Is Emotional Invalidation? Cause & Effects | ReGain Emotional invalidation can be extremely painful and difficult to deal with. Get support from a licensed therapist for emotional invalidation today.

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”
- Leonard Cohen

One thing that upsets me are people that have (or don't have) mental illness or a disorder and comment things that add to the stigma of mental illness.

They might compare struggles, accuse other people of not trying hard enough, think the thing that helped them would help every single other person, invalidate someone's experience and seem to have an almost apathetic attitude towards other people who are in the same boat as them.

I feel like this is internalized ableism being projected onto others because deep down on the inside they are still struggling and perhaps have been told by others a bunch of harmful and negative things that have made them lash out onto others.

Often belittling others is a persons way of dealing with their own problems but it isn't in any way healthy or helpful and only brings other people down who needed to be lifted up.

Mental illness isn't a competition and no one persons struggles are less than someone else's.
Everyone is doing what they can with what they have and no one gets to make the judgement that someone isn't trying hard enough to overcome their problems.

Money is also not an indication of how someone's mental health should be. Having the money to get therapy doesn't mean that person feels safe getting therapy. Money does not erase the shame and embarrassment that often exists within someone that has mental illness. A lot of people with mental illness or disorders worry about what others might think of them if they find out they aren't 100% functioning.

Putting people down and making them question the validity of their suffering only adds to the amount of people not getting help.

Everyone needs to be more supportive and have higher awareness of how the things they say might be interpreted by another and how that might interfere with their ability to get help.

Making people think or believe that they aren't trying hard enough or that the reasons why they have anxiety or depression are weak compared to something else isn't helpful to the community and you should learn to do better.

-Mi

This explains Cluster A personality disorders.
Paranoid, Schizoid and Schizotypal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2509VHoA9Q

Osmosis | Cluster A personality disorders (Behavioral Sciences) SummaryAlright! As a quick recap, cluster A personality disorders are split into paranoid personality disorder, or “accusatory”, schizoid personality disorde...

If I had the money and the energy and ability to get diagnosed I would.

The downside to not being professionally diagnosed is that I am expected to behave like a normal person since no doctor has said otherwise. Everything I experience is determined to be normal person stuff. Which means I get put into categories of hypochondriac, lazy, not trying hard enough...

My pain is dismissed, my troubles are dismissed, everything that I struggle with isn't real because I have no paper that says it is and I'm not allowed to talk about it either.
If you talk about it, you're just pretending to have something wrong with you, you're just trying to be trendy. Or whatever anti self diagnosed people repeat.

I have to struggle on my own without support.
Just get diagnosed they say.

How many more doctors out of all the doctors I have seen already do I have to see before I'm listened to? How many hundreds of dollars before I find an actual expert? How many more times do I have to hear a doctor tell me it's because I'm fat, it's just in my head, I'm just being negative, maybe I should try harder, literally laugh in my face, accuse me of being a drug addict...

How many more times?

It's so tiring not being believed, not being heard, being dismissed over and over and over again.

-Mi

Childhood trauma damages emotional health but also physically affects the brain. Trauma rewires several parts of the brain, altering their activity and influence over the body.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA4CqlL_PzE&t=5s

Wired for Danger: The Effects of Childhood Trauma on the Brain Childhood trauma damages emotional health but also physically affects the brain. Trauma rewires several parts of the brain, altering their activity and influ...

"Mental illness is constantly either demonized or romanticized by society and there is no space in that dichotomy for real people with mental illness to exist without feeling shamed and invalidated and that isn't fair."

I've been considering deleting my page simply because I feel like I have no right to talk about mental health or disorders when I haven't been officially diagnosed as anything other than clinical depression and social anxiety (and social anxiety is an incorrect diagnosis).
I've been reading too many people that have a hatred of those that diagnose themself and they repeat the same boring rhetoric of 'doctors don't even diagnose themselves'.
What do you do when you have no money? When you've been to doctors most of your life and no one knows what is wrong with you and no one listens to your opinion of yourself? What do you do when any opinion on what you have gets scoffed at?
Since doctors don't know, does that mean I am fine?

I have concluded that I have schizotypal personality disorder but I just get the whole you don't seem 'crazy', you look normal dismissiveness and it makes me want to stay quiet and play a life of pretend I am a normal person.

Anti self diagnose people seem to believe that no one is capable of knowing themself and that a lived life experience means nothing to a piece of paper.
Do these people go to the doctor every time they sneeze or have a headache? I doubt it.

A doctor doesn't know me, will never understand my experience, they will never yet they are somehow the expert on who I am? Experts that never listen to me. Experts that shrug or laugh off anything I say. You'll hear a chorus of people telling you to find another doctor but if doctors are such experts why should I be seeing multiple ones to get a simple diagnosis? Why am I spending so much money that I don't have trying to find an expert within experts?

Do I ignore these people and continue my page?

People are capable of self awareness. They are capable of knowing they have something. Yes there is a lot of overlap but when you know, you just know. If you haven't experienced that, that doesn't mean everyone doesn't.

Ever had cancer and you just knew? Ever had a problem with your gallbladder and you just knew? But the doctors dismissed you over and over and over again until you needed emergency surgery because you were right all along?

People can know themselves. People can know their experiences and connect the dots and just know.

Privilege is having the money and resources to see doctors and mental health professionals. It's finding a doctor that listens to you. It's getting diagnosed within a couple of months.

I've been seeing doctors since I was 17. I'm now 38 and no one knows what is wrong with me. No one will diagnose me as anything and I am far from a normal, functioning person of society.

Stop attacking those that are left with self diagnosis and be grateful that you were lucky enough to get diagnosed by a doctor.

-Mi

"It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents:
joyous positive and despairing negative - whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it."

I'm sorry for my absence.

I have a tendency to lose track of time when I don't really do much and every day seems exactly the same as before it.

I sat here and wrote a long bloggy update but then it disappeared under the guise of 'technical issues' and I am so annoyed I currently don't have the energy to re write my lengthy post.

Just know I've been somewhat okay, just my motivation doesn't seem to be for everything and I get stuck obsessing over certain other things instead of the things I wanted to keep updated like this page.

When these technical and internetal issues sort themselves out hopefully it will be back to regular updates.

In the meantime, I'll try and make some more quote images.

Mi

"Though it may not seem like it at times, I'm really doing the best I can."

"Self Hate: The deadliest 'dis-ease' experienced by wounded souls."
- T.F. Hodge

Every time I talk to anyone I feel shame and guilt afterwards.
I try to distract myself but the feelings remain.
Then it turns into anxiety and paranoia thinking I've some how made a fool of myself or said something I shouldn't have and now everyone thinks I'm bad and horrible and crazy and will leave me.

I find it hard to be productive and I just sit around thinking of all the stupid things I have said.

I hate it when this happens because eventually I cycle through to I'm wasting my day, wasting my life, thinking I'm a failure and reminding myself that this is part of the reason I do not like interacting with anyone.

I start to get bothered about things that don't normally bother me and my mind just goes round and round and round in circles and I try to erase the feelings with emotional eating.

Maybe I'll feel better tomorrow since I have never been able to start fresh in the middle of a day.

•Mi•

Earlier this week I went to the doctor for the first time in 3 years.
I’ve been replaying my behaviour and speech pattern over and over in my head. I’ve been worried I came across as slightly manic with talking fast and nonstop talking and mixing up my words and over sharing.

I originally just went in there to talk about my eyesight and ask if she thinks if the things I see in my peripheral vision could simply be related to stress and I ended up exploding with my mental health in it’s entirety.

After hearing me speak she concluded that I seemed very unwell and gave me numbers for therapists to think about seeing and gave me a prescription for Prozac. One of which I’ve never taken before surprisingly enough.

I’m not anti med use but my bad experiences in the past make me feel less positive about it actually helping.
It’s only been three days so there isn’t much to report other than I’m already struggling to sleep even more than I was previously. I have read this side effect usually passes so I’ll see how I go.

I have a follow up appointment in a few weeks time and I need to get a blood test before then too.

Part of me regrets going and I don’t know why exactly. Maybe the depression that doesn’t see the point. But I’m going to try and ignore that and stick with the doctors suggestion.

Of anyone has had any experience with this medication I’d love to know how it went for you.

•Mi•

“Sending love to everyone who wants to do better but can’t find the energy to make the necessary changes. Sending love to everyone who wonders if their exhaustion is permanent. Sending love to everyone who is tired of feeling stuck.”
-MichellCClark

“Quiet borderline personality disorder (BPD) is not a recognized subtype in terms of diagnosis; rather, it’s a term that refers to people who meet the criteria for diagnosis of borderline personality disorder but who don’t fit the typical profile.

A typical presentation of BPD involves angry outbursts and obvious and outward self destructiveness, those with quiet BPD have internalized emotional episodes (they turn their anger inward).”

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-quiet-borderline-personality-disorder-5115074

What Is Quiet Borderline Personality Disorder? Learn more about quiet borderline personality disorder, including traits, symptoms, diagnosis, and how to seek treatment.