Animus hit button

By tinker Tuesday, February 24, 2009

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My animus hit a sore spot with me today. Lonliness is one of the worst side effects of prolonged illness.

I was a practicing alcoholic for a while when my children were growing up. My daughter has never forgiven me, though I have been sober sixteen years now, and a lot of her childhood was great...we often only remember the negative in life. My son has been affected more by the suicide attempts of this illness over sixteen years ago. He has become silent and secretive with me. This is a horrible lonliness. I wanted children so badly when I was young and this illness destroyed my dream. I hardly hear from them, and my daughter is hateful.

I had a car accident in 2001 and that set off a relapse of the p/sz. Because of the sudden craziness I lost two of my dearest friends. Both were my friends for over ten years...more like sisters than my own. When I am ill I become needy and that drove them away. I don't blame them, though often I think they weren't such great friends when they could just walk away from such a longtime friendship because of my illness. Where was the compassion and understanding of friendship?

I have begun to understand that there is no such thing as my definition of friendship. How I am I cannot expect others to be. I am a grateful and loyal person. I praise and build others esteem up. I am always there when needed. I have very high expectations of what kind of friend I am. In fact, I help too much! That is not always good. I set people up.

One of the questions that I have learned to ASK MYSELF IS: Just WHO are you dealing with? One of the friends had relapsed and was smoking pot and drinking again. The other friend was married to a real son of a @#$%^ and had her own problems. Plus, he wanted to keep her isolated...afraid of losing her.

No one is healthy in this world. I AM lonely. I am ill with various problems that people judge very harshly. I can't hide these illness's. I certainly WOULD if I could!

The real question is what do I expect? Can anyone meet MY expectations? What are the lies I tell myself?

The bottom line is that I don't have the energy to go out into the world to meet people any more. AA was one of my outlets, but I am no longer considered sober because I must take narcotics for the pain of the nerve damage. That door is closed.

I am now 54 years old and p/sz has ruined my life. I am not whining, but it is the bare obvious TRUTH. Life is life. I can't lie when the circumstances glare it like a neon sign. I am NOT lucky to have this disease. I resent it, but I accept it. I have no choice.

Lonliness is not the worst thing in this life. Failure is.

Thanks for reading

Love

Dellea

Kill the victim

Comments (2) | Add comment

Christina Bruni, Health Guide

2/24/09 2:20pm

Hi Dellea,

Your SharePost says it all about how you feel so I won't try to put it into my own words.

I'm sure you were a good mother and you wanted so much for your children to forgive you. I want to tell you that I understand it is hard, when someone asks us, "What is the pain like?" we have no answer because it just is the way it is.

In time, as you make your way, I'm sure you'll find pockets of sunshine that outweigh the pain. I also want to tell you that I believe you are not only helping yourself, you are inspiring other people by what you write in here. I'm sure others can relate to what you're going through, as I certainly at times feel the way you do.

Cheers,

Christina

SpandaDevi

2/26/09 4:24pm

Dear Dellea,

Thank you for sharing your post. I sense a depth to your pain. I feel to offer you my love by way of this response; I hope you will accept it as such.

Although, over the years, I have felt lonely many, many times I realize now that it's due to wrong understanding. Would you consider that there is a difference between being lonely and being alone?

Our feelings are based on our understanding. Changing our understanding automatically changes our feeling. It is possible to be alone without experiencing loneliness.

While there are no effective ways to hide from mental illness, there are ways to heal it.

One pathway of healing, that has greatly helped me, is to realize that one of my symptoms is to superimpose things that are not there. This includes communication. I may project a belief I have about a circumstance. (Such as, "Why is he being so ungrateful? I was only trying to help!") Sometimes this belief creates associations between things that are unrelated. (Such as, "Last time I tried to be helpful, this also happened. Everything I do is wrong. Why should I even bother? My love is obviously not wanted. He must not care about me.") After realizing that I often do this, I began to take greater responsibility for my communication.

One of the things I did is to ask the other person for clarification to either validate my association of thoughts or to disregard them as false, simply as part of the illness. If I deemed they were false, I ignored them. Even if the thoughts bothered me in the moment I forced myself to ignore them over and over again. Eventually, the ignored thought goes away. The more I practiced this approach, the easier it was to put into effect next time and the more control I gained over directing my thoughts. Eventually, this meant I made less and less false projections and wrong associations.

This helped me in many ways. In one way, it helped me to understand, care about and take responsibility for how my illness affects others instead of feeling overwhelmed and ill equipped.

This led to a profound shift in my life... I was able to hear and accept the pain that my mom felt due to her experience of my illnesses. As a result, we were able to close the gap between us. There were a lot of tears in the process but it lead to a heart full of forgiveness and an eagerness to share love. Because of this one act, we are very close now and have been for several years. We each have the willingness now to work through whatever comes up.

You may wish to consider if any of this applies to you and if there is some similar approach you can take with your loved ones.

For what it’s worth, I also want to share an observation of myself that may or may not apply. I used to seek someone to validate me by liking and accepting me, and at the same time, I deeply feared being so unlikeable and unacceptable that hardened and kept people at an arms length away.

Eventually, I accepted myself. Now, I am not lonely because I am no longer looking to fill something that I think I lack. I know I do not lack anything. I recognize that it was my firm belief in lacking something that caused my feelings of loneliness. Although I may find myself alone, I no longer feel lonely.

In order to heal, I have had to see and accept many things about myself that I wish just weren't there. The truth isn't always pretty, but it truth is always freeing. :)

With Supreme Love,

SpandaDevi

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