Change Your Thoughts to Change Your Life

When the storm of SZ rages, you need to have faith in yourself and maintain the hope that things will get better, even when it feels you’re going through hell.

Some practical techniques will allow us to deal with our feelings, and quiet the internal narrator who bullies us. Using what goes on in my life as an example, I’ll branch out from there. Lately, I’m able to comfort myself by saying, “You have schizophrenia. It’s something you didn’t bring on yourself.” This calms me because I know I have something a little harder than most people. Objectifying what I go through and placing it outside myself allows me to be less harsh, and more forgiving.

As hard as it is for me to talk about the hell, I’m going to if it will benefit others. As an expert on recovery, I feel I must show you what I go through, and give you ideas about how you can deal with your own pain. You’re going to ask me, “If it doesn’t get any easier, why bother to want to recover?” First of all, nothing worth having comes without effort. Life wasn’t meant to be easy. We’re given knocks, and it’s our duty and right to fight back harder.

When I was diagnosed in 1987, I didn’t have any role models. To quote the poet Theodore Roethke, “I learned by going where I had to go.” I’ve been down this road 20 years. Maybe you’re just starting out. The point is to keep walking clear into the next lifetime. To hold your head high. Which is why I take comfort in knowing I wouldn’t have chosen this illness, that somehow it chose my brain.

Sometimes, at work, or during other times in the day, walking home or riding the train, I tell myself, “You have schizophrenia, that’s okay.” I need to hear that to absolve myself from being self-critical. I accept now that I tend to worry. That doesn’t mean I can’t change, or won’t try to reduce the beating on myself that I do. Accepting this part of my nature has been the first step in tackling it. I’ve always found this to be true: “What we resist, persists.”

I’ve come to reconcile as best I can that opposing tendencies exist in each of us. Using dialectic thinking, I’ve come to know that things aren’t “either/or.” Myself, I tended to see things in absolute terms: that I had to be outgoing, or I was wrong for being quiet. My first therapist told me that wanting to be someone other than who I am, “was like a leopard trying to change her spots. You’d do best to love your spots.”

Dialectic thinking connects two seemingly dichotomous realities with “and.” In this way, it’s been liberating for me to understand “I am confident and insecure,” and “I am gregarious and reserved.” This cognitive re-framing allows us to feel good about ourselves instead of fretting we are limited in what we can do and be. Try this: “I have schizophrenia and have a happy life.” Even if it doesn’t seem true, writing it down or repeating that phrase over and over will make it come true.