I did not post yesterday as I was in too much pain. Today is better, although I don’t really have a set topic for today’s post. Self-care would be a good one.
I’ve learned a lot about what that means in just the last six months. Some of it came from the guidance of others, and an equal amount came from me learning my body and my brain and what connects the two of them back together. In regards to psychosis and anxiety, although they tend to be categorized as separate, they have similar attributes. I’d say the biggest difference is anxiety you still recognize your physical and mental place in the world during your disconnect. With psychosis, nothing has a place and you are the center of that nothingness.
But they are similar in that you feel dissociated from the people around you, from life, from everything. Panic can make you believe you’re dying, psychosis can make you believe you’re already dead. Anxiety makes you think badly about yourself, psychosis is lazy and will just let the voices reprimand you. And the biggest part of all of this is that separation between the turmoil in your mind and the placement of your body. This is where the idea of grounding techniques come from; there’s this idea–quite an effective one–that if you can center yourself in your limbs, remind yourself who you are and that you exist in this moment, you become more aware of right now instead of tomorrow or yesterday or the future. That’s great for anxiety.
Grounding probably won’t stop you from believing your dead. But it may help ease the anxiety of the idea of being dead, and in that process you learn to accept death. In learning to accept death and the terror and trauma which may be circling death, you accept the idea of being dead. Once you’re there it becomes a little easier to put some weight to both sides: maybe I’m dead, maybe I’m not dead. Either way, I accept what is. That can take some power from the psychosis.
Professionals talk about wanting to break people from their delusions by presenting facts or evidence or saying “well, if that was true, why is this happening?” but that makes zero sense because in delusion everything has a place. And if it doesn’t have a place, we’ll make it have a place with “I don’t know how it works, but that’s how it works” and you won’t have any evidence (to us) against that solid argument.
And so breaking is an illogical step. Telling your loved one that this can’t happen because of that and then getting frustrated at them because they don’t believe you only adds more stress.
The power of unifying the mind and body, accepting uncomfortable thoughts and ideas, giving Anxiety a place to disperse is my greatest form of self-care. Giving my mind a chance to feel how my body is affected by certain thoughts, giving my body a chance to react to my fear and anxiety my mind tumbles through, gives me a chance to tether the two back together and gives me a sense of being a whole person. Because one thing about both anxiety and psychosis is that you feel shattered. You feel like a million pieces being pulled in a million and one directions and none of the directions make much sense. Or they make perfect sense and in that, make no sense because nothing can be perfect.
Self-care doesn’t always mean “doing what makes you feel good”. Sometimes it means doing what you need to in order to grow. And that can be quite uncomfortable.
Reconnecting your physical and mental selves doesn’t just have to be through mindfulness or meditation or mindful-meditation, I’ve learned. Although those ways are quite useful. For example, music reconnects my mind to my body, especially if I’m in my room and playing it on speakers where I can really feel the vibration of the sound and move with it. Japanese Karaoke, the Karaoke in the private rooms, is one of the best ways my mind and body sync up again, my mind riding waves of emotion and my body, my diaphragm and stomach and throat specifically, capturing those emotions into vocalization.
People wonder why medication doesn’t take their mental pain away and that’s because it can’t. We all know this, and if some of us don’t, well, get comfortable with the idea that there’s no such thing as a quick fix. Medication is a bandage. It will do nothing for your thoughts but numb you from them. It will do nothing for your trauma. For a lot of us, it will do nothing for voices besides make them fainter and easier to ignore (which isn’t a bad thing, it can be quite helpful). But, if all you do is throw some chemicals at your brain and roll some dice, you’re essentially allowing yourself to shatter. You’re blockading a chance to be whole again and maybe that’s because the idea of being whole is so foreign to you. Or maybe it’s too terrifying. Maybe it’s too real and too raw and it’s much easier to hide behind numbness than to face sharpness.
And that’s okay too. If that’s where you are your best, if that’s how you function best, if it’s not going to bite you in the ass ten years down the road, great. For me, I didn’t function being a shattered person. And so I listen to myself. I listen to every pain, every ache, every burst of happiness, every drop of sadness, every small voice, every screaming voice, every immovable belief, because all of it means something. It’s not random and useless. It’s annoying and tiring, but it’s a reflection of turmoil and an indication that I’m separating from myself again. That’s a warning sign.
What happens when we bury those warning signs? Or hide from them? Well, they just seem to multiply. And for me, I’d rather care for myself and nurture one warning than feel trampled by thirty.
The Philosophical Psychotic 