Strength From Within, Part 4 - Recalibrating My Thinking

This is the fourth post in my series on Strength From Within.

In the first post I talk about how Dr. Oz stated that each person's body changes every 7 years on a cellular level, leaving each of us as an entirely different person. I talk about how I struggled in my different body with Fibromyalgia and what I now had to do when faced with my body being different- learn how to deal with the changes and discover myself all over again.

In the second post I talk about having to grieve my losses, letting myself feel all the negative emotions, and let the losses go so that my heart could have emotional freedom and the space to discover myself.

In the third post I describe a process I went through in how I decided to do something scary and face my fears, not letting them take over my life. This took courage, but it changed my life and let me teach my son Reilly about being brave like his name describes.

In this post I will walk through some of how I have had to recalibrate my thinking. I talk about some of this already in my post on the New Normal. I described how I struggled with coming to terms in having Fibro because of it being nebulous, relatively unknown, and invisible.

Some days were ok, and some days I was irritable and depressed. I go on to talk about an attitude adjustment I've had to make in my thinking about Fibro as I had to think of where I am at now as the new normal, and learn to be ok with it.

After living with that attitude adjustment for a while I realized that I still had some thought adjustments to make, and came to a startling conclusion that was almost a revelation.

Have you ever had your brain tell you something, and you just ignored it and kept going about your day? Or, after your brain told you something, you said, "No way, Brain!!" and rejected that thought? Or, it tells you something and you laugh about it, thinking your brain is just being funny? And your brain says, "No, I'm really serious!"

Or, it could just be me...

Anyway, what my brain was telling me now was this:

Rather than focusing so much on what I had lost through Fibromyalgia, I needed to see what I had gained. 

Wait, what??!?!?

Surely my brain was just being funny, right?!?

Nope... not being funny. 

So... here I am with this thing my brain is telling me. I didn't really want to think about it. However, while I really just want to ignore it (or reject it outright), I let it sit there. I realize that I already know my brain has a point.

All this time I've been thinking about all the negatives of Fibromyalgia. And when you focus on the negatives a lot, well, it's kind of a negative way to live. I also have been completely ignoring anything good that I might have gained (aka, looking for the silver lining).

So, I start thinking about it. And thinking. And more thinking (I think a lot, if you haven't picked that up by now!).

I think about how I was before I struggled with Fibromyalgia, and how I am now.

I have far more compassion now. Not that I didn't have any before, but I just didn't let myself think all that much about how difficult it must be for those that really struggled with illnesses, conditions, and diseases. Those that struggled with deeper emotions and inner conflict didn't move me deeply, I just was sad for them and that they were going through a difficult time. Now, it gives me pause. Now, I know how hard these kinds of things can be and hope they are able to work through it and get help if they need it. Now, I have a welling up of emotions when I think about everything they are going through. Compassion is part of the underlying reason I started this blog.

My priorities have shifted. Before, I did whatever I felt like doing and needed doing. Now I only have energy for a certain number of things throughout the day, so I do what I can to balance the needs of my family with being able to get enough rest for myself. I can only do one or two regular activities (like community groups or bible studies) a week so I need to make sure they are the best things for me to do each semester. This has simplified my life and helped me to focus on what's really important.
 
I think about the things I thought about before, and what I think about now. Before I looked externally to shape my internal world. Now I look internally to shape my external world. Before I was concerned about what other people would think about me. Now I'm more concerned with doing/saying what I think/believe is right.

I think about what I did before and what I do now. Before I had the energy to have everything clean the way I wanted it, organized, and have everything exactly where I wanted it. When I was a teen it would drive me crazy anytime someone changed something of mine, or got into my things. In college it would bug me anytime someone wanted to borrow something because I had my things exactly the way I wanted them (I still did it, but I didn't like it).

Now I don't have the energy to get everything clean and organized, or have the energy to care that it isn't done. I know if I had kids without having had to make shifts in my priorities and in what I do, I would have driven them crazy with trying to meet my idealist perfectionism. Now, I do what I have to do but I'm more focused on spending time with my husband and boys, and taking care of myself, rather than driving myself (and everyone else) crazy trying to get everything done the way I would rather have it.

This only scratches the surface of the ways my thinking has had to be recalibrated. It took some time in doing this but it was worth it. I now know I'm personally in a much better place as a result of having Fibromyalgia for these reasons I mention and more.

My brain really had something there when it told me I needed to change how I was thinking.

It's possible it wasn't just my brain but God speaking to me in a way I would hear it. Either way, recalibrating my thinking has helped me enormously! There are other shifts in how I've been thinking about things that I've realized and discovered which I will relate in my next post.

Read Strength From Within, Part 5: Reaffirming My Faith

Strength From Within, Part 3 - Facing My Fears

This is the third post in my series on Strength From Within.

In the first post I talk about how Dr. Oz stated that each person's body changes every 7 years on a cellular level, leaving each of us an entirely different person. I talk about how I struggled in my different body with Fibromyalgia and what I now had to do when faced with my body being different- learn how to deal with the changes and discover myself all over again.

In the second post I talk about having to grieve my losses and let myself feel all the negative emotions so that my heart could have emotional freedom and space to discover myself.

In order to discover more of who I am, I needed to get rid of things that were holding me back. The biggest of these is my fears. This post is all about facing my fears.

I have had fears running through my head for as long as I can remember but they were always controllable. However, around the time I was pregnant and after my first son was born these fears ramped up and almost took over my life. Post Partum Depression didn't help with this. I could see in my head, like a horrible dream or fantasy, every single possible bad outcome that my fears predicted.

They swirled around and around in my head over and over and over. It was like a repeating slideshow or movie of everything I never wanted to see happen. A lot of my mental energy was directed at trying not to see them and they kept coming anyway, so that wore me out. It was a really dark, depressing, and terrible time for me. I just wanted to run away and hide from life, and I often did that as much as possible (avoidance coping mechanism!).

After some counseling, adjustments, medication, and some longer periods of sleep (newborn, remember!?),  I realized I couldn't keep living with fear like this. It was hurting me. It was hurting my relationships, especially with my husband and my new son. It was keeping me from going out of the house and doing much of anything at all.

So, after a lot of reflecting and working my courage up, I decided to do something scary.

Seriously scary.

I told myself that for one minute I would let my fears and horrible fantasies about my fears just play out in my head till the end. All the fears about losing my husband and son in awful tragic ways, all the ways others might be hurt by painful things I caused, all the rejection I could feel from those around me, all the love I longed for and was afraid I wouldn't have... every single thing.

It was hard. One of the hardest things I've ever done. I wasn't sure I could do it without being sucked into a vortex of emotion that would just consume me. But, I knew I needed to try something. I couldn't keep living the way I was.

So, when a fear came over me and was too strong for me to ignore, I would let myself feel it, experience it, and live it out in my head. But, only for a minute.

When that minute was done I would stop that internal picture, the self flagellating monologue in my head, and just breathe.

And breathe.

And breathe.

Then I would tell myself, and show myself an internal picture, that even if the worst should happen with this fear I would still be ok. God has His hand around mine and will not let me be destroyed. I would be shaken, I would be hurt, I would be wounded, I would be saddened, but I would not be destroyed and ultimately I would be ok.

This took a lot of courage and some scary times over a several month period, but it changed my heart and my circumstances in ways I'm still feeling the effects of today. This also came hand in hand with working through my faith, which I will share in part five.

I no longer have the consuming fears that threaten to swallow me up. I still have fears that are hard, but most of the time I can push them aside because I know now that I will be ok without having to play it out in my head. I am in a much better place now after going through this step.

As we were in the process of choosing the name for our son I had just started to feel the wave of fears wash towards me. One of the reasons I was drawn to the name Reilly, spelled with the Irish spelling (has to be the Irish spelling!!), is because one translation stated that Reilly meant brave and courageous. 

I paused on it every time I read that because that was what I so wanted to be! Every so often along the way we have told him what his name means- brave, courageous, and what those words and ideas mean. He loves it. And, he lives it. When he gets scared sometimes he will shy away or say something about it being scary. But, then he tells himself and us, "It's ok! I'll be brave!".

 [This picture was from our trip to the beach last year. Previously he had been afraid of the water 

because it rose really high on him all of a sudden and knocked him down a couple years ago. This trip he 

played in the sand and kept looking at the water. Then he just stops and says, "Mommy, Daddy, I'm going
to be brave and go in the water!". He did. He went in the part that had almost no waves, and towards 
the end he went into the water with the normal waves. We were/are all proud of him and his bravery!]

I don't think I would have been able to tell or show Reilly effectively what it means to be brave if I hadn't decided to face my fears and be brave myself! It was and still is so hard to do, but it is definitely worth the effort!

Read Strength From Within, Part 4: Recalibrating My Thinking

Holding Onto Hope- Combating Depression and Fatigue

If you haven't read my first post on depression yet I hope you will read it first. I talk about zombies in it, so really, why wouldn't you want to read it?!?

Once you have, I want to tell you that if you suffer from depression and still want to try to live a full life, there are several steps I would urge you to take.

Step 1: Find Hope
In my previous post I stated that, "you want to believe there is hope for things to be different when you so often feel like there isn't any." When you suffer from depression, especially deep depression, hope is what you need to hold on to. You need a reason to hope. You need a reason to keep going even when you don't feel like it. Even when everything seems impossible, everything feels like blah blank boring empty nothingness, you think you can't possibly go another day the way you are...ness. You need to find something, or several somethings that give you a reason to get up day after day, to resist giving into the blahness, to continue to form and maintain relationships even if you keep thinking there isn't any point. You need a reason.

Allie's reason was kind of nebulous- she was able to laugh hysterically at something small (a piece of corn sitting all alone under the fridge), so maybe everything isn't hopeless. However, when everything seems hopeless, when you have no reason to keep going... A reason, however nebulous, is enough for a while.

 
After a long while I realized I had three reasons to hope, and things I hold onto to maintain hope: My God, my husband, and my child (now children). The more reasons you have, the more motivation you have for making yourself do things that seem impossible when you are lying in bed thinking everything seems too difficult.

I can't tell you how many days I woke up lying in bed thinking, "Why am I awake? Why should I even get out of bed? Why should I even care about getting up?" Once my first son was born, the answer always became, "Because Reilly needs me. I love him. I'm his mom and I need to take care of him because there isn't anyone else to do it when Steve is at work." Reilly gave me reasons to get out of bed, and often I got smiles which made a little pocket of happy in my day filled with zombie like foggy thinking.

Steve gave me reasons to care about other aspects of life and drew me more into being around other people, whether I wanted to or not. I wanted to because I wanted to see people, and to be and feel normal. However, it often seemed like a lot of effort and energy expended so I wasn't always sure I wanted to. Afterwards, I was always glad I did. Classic introversion made a lot worse with depression!

Steve, himself, is an amazing man, loves me unconditionally, and has often made me laugh or smile when I wasn't expecting it. At some point there will be a post all devoted to him as there are so many ways a spouse can help or hurt someone going through a chronic condition.

[Steve, Reilly, and I taken a few years ago by our friend

 Sarah at Sarah Zimmerman Photography]

My God is the underlying foundation beneath everything. I seriously think He's the reason I'm still able to show love when my emotions feel so much like nothing. He's the reason I push myself to care about and for Reilly and Steve, now Connor, and my other relationships when I could so easily just not care and let myself be isolated. He's the reason I even want to have hope, because life without God so easily seems hopeless. Holding onto my faith hasn't been easy, as I'll share in a later post, but it has been completely worth it.

If you don't believe in God, I would ask you to consider the reasons that keep you from it. I wouldn't be surprised if it had little to do with God and everything to do with people that gave you a reason to resist believing in Him. However, whether you believe in God or not, I urge you to find some reason, any reason, to have hope and hold onto it day after day.

As you go through each day find little reasons, little signs, that there is a reason for hope. It can be as little as a flower or sunset, and as big as someone showing you love in some way. Each person will have different things that give them hope throughout their day. I will tell you, though, that this can be difficult as it's easy to just ignore everything that could be a sign of hope as you continue in your depression. Still, please try. The more you do it, the easier it gets.

Step 2- Find Ways to Ease Your Symptoms
Whether it's medication, supplements, exercise, relationships, dietary adjustments, or some form of meditation/spirituality, it is really important to find ways that help ease your symptoms. I won't list all the possible things of each you can do in this post as you can easily do a Google search and come up with a ton of information- although I may go into some of them in more detail later. I can tell you that the more you can do, the more it will help.

However, what works for some doesn't always work for others. Also, because there is a ton of information available, it can also be overwhelming to figure out where to start. Where I would start is with something that seems manageable that could help a lot- like taking a daily vitamin if you currently don't do that. A vitamin is such a little thing but I always feel better when I've taken them and always feel worse if I've skipped a few days. I don't always recognize it in the moment, but after I've started feeling bad I look back and realize I forgot to take them.

Another manageable thing is to just sit outside in the sun for 15-20 minutes every day with no sunscreen. Unless you have extremely sensitive skin you shouldn't burn during that amount of time. The reason you want to skip the sunscreen is that while sunscreen blocks UV rays, it also blocks the rays that carry vitamin D. Vitamin D can help your body feel better in general and most people are deficient. So, if you want to gain Vitamin D skip the sunscreen just for a little while.

A seminar I listened to said you can get all the Vitamin D you need for a day by being naked in the sun just for 5 minutes with no sunscreen. Now, I don't recommend that- don't want to scandalize the neighbors or cause issues with little kids running around (though if you have privacy areas, what you do in your home is your business)! However, with summer approaching, unless you are so deep into depression you can't get out of bed (in that case perhaps open the window and shades for a while?), it shouldn't be too difficult to sit in the sun with shorts and a t-shirt for even 10 minutes while you read or play games on your phone. Well, at least that's probably what I'd be doing (being honest)!

Step 3- Avoid Pity Parties
When you are in deep depression, and especially in that spiral of depression, it is soooo easy to throw yourself pity parties. Then, when you do get together with people you tend to invite them to your pity parties too. I could tell you some stories but they would just depress you. Just suffice it to say, Yeah... so easy!

Unfortunately, when your depression has a piece of it based on mood, internal and external factors, this just feeds your depression and makes it worse. It can sometimes feel like it's helping. After all, misery loves company! But, that's the thing... company in misery just makes more misery. It doesn't really help at all.

What helps with this is to replace pity parties with thinking something positive, even if it's little. When you realize you are in that place where you are entertaining your pity party, find one of your hopes and just embrace it. Immerse yourself in it, marinate in it, (insert favorite action verb that basically means to surround yourself with it here). Spend time/talk with that person, do that thing, look at that piece of beauty. Whatever your hope may be, just start feeling, thinking, and doing everything about that hope that you can so it blocks the feelings, thoughts, and actions of your pity party. This can take a while to get to where it's an auto shift in thinking, but you can do it.

Every time you shift your pity party to your hope it helps that much more. Any change takes a while to become automatic. First, it's completely hindsight- so it could be days in your pity party before you remember, and that's ok. The more you do it the better and sooner it will get. Then it becomes the same day, then hours, and minutes, until finally it's a pity party mode first with a quick shift to hope in almost the same instant. But, all this is a process. So, it will take a while. Give yourself grace in the meantime and don't give up on it.

[If you are a Doctor Who fan (because who wouldn't want to be!?!), you will immediately recognize 

David Tennant who plays the Tenth Doctor on the show. David Tennant did an excellent job at portraying 

the dichotomy of a deeply depressed individual who still managed to often find happy things in life 

and reasons to maintain hope, sometimes after indulging in a pity party. He's a favorite 

Doctor and actor for that alone.]

 
Step 4- Adjust Your Coping Mechanisms
A coping mechanism is anything you do to adjust to the effects of stress in the hopes of reducing the impact stress has on you. Coping mechanisms are most basically broken down into fight (e.g. learn more, attack the problem, seek help, blame others) and flight (e.g. avoidance, denial, distancing, humor).

Some of these are positive, and some not so positive. Learning more, attacking the problem, and seeking help are all positive coping mechanisms. Blaming others, denial, and avoidance (anything you use to keep from dealing with stress, such as substances, affairs, or overindulging in hobbies) are negative ones. You will notice I didn't mention humor as a positive thing even though you would think it was? I also didn't mention distancing in the two categories. Well, with these two it's not so cut and dried (ever wonder how we got sayings like that one?!?).

Sometimes distancing can help because it gives you space to look at stressors and the situation more objectively so you can handle it. However, you don't want to stay with that distance maintained. That is when it becomes a negative, and more like avoidance. At some point you will need to deal with the stress rather than keep it at arm's length. Humor is a form of distancing. It can be a stress reliever, but if you use it too often it can become annoying, unhelpful, and more stressful.

My go to coping mechanism is avoidance, and most often is with books. I tend to read a lot. No, I really mean a lot. Seriously, a LOT. If I had a physical book for each book I've read, including the multiple times I've read them, I think my entire house would be lined with books.

If you are a book lover of any kind this could seem like a dream come true! The only problem with my coping mechanism of reading is that I often read fiction... and when I read I tend to completely immerse myself in the story... so much that if it's a good book I can view what's happening in my head like a movie or as if I'm there. Book lovers won't see a whole lot of problem with this (I can totally hear you saying, "Of course not! Why is this a problem!?!").

Well, here's the problem... when I'm living immersed in the world of the current book I'm reading, I'm missing what is happening out here in the real world ("Well, yeah, that's half the point of reading!"). And, if I'm missing what is happening out here in the real world, while I am missing [read: avoiding] the stress, I'm also missing all the good stuff and memories that are happening with the people I love ("........*blink*.......But.....*blink*......").

Yeah, not a lot I can say back at that one...

Now, I'm not saying I don't read anymore. Far from it! I still have stress and have a hard time coping with stress sometimes. However, I try to limit it when I can. If that doesn't work during a high stress period, after a time I will have a book fast in which I don't read many books at all (I'm in one now and decided to start a blog- funny what can happen!). Sometimes this comes naturally after I've read all my favorite books again, and everything that I can find at the library, and am in a waiting spell for more books by my favorite authors to be published (sometimes with internal pouting... and lots of sighs...). However, usually I get to some sort of saturation point when I have gotten to a place where I've avoided for as long as I can mentally, emotionally, and physically take and just have to deal with the parts of life I've been avoiding.

So, how do you adjust your coping mechanisms? First, recognize the coping mechanisms you have in the list I mentioned above. If you are having trouble with figuring out your coping mechanisms, you are welcome to let me know and I will help you with this! Second, identify one or two coping mechanisms that you think would be good to do instead. Or, to do what I've mentioned, which is do what you can to keep it from taking over your life. With some things this will work. In other instances (substance abuse being a big one), you may need to abstain entirely and find another way to cope.

After these two things, you adjust similarly to the process I mentioned in the pity party section. It will take time, but you can adjust, you can do it, and it can become normal to have a positive coping mechanism that still lets you experience life in the midst of depression and stress. 

Hold onto Hope, even (especially!) when all you can feel right now is nothing. Feelings aren't facts and don't get to dictate your life. You can do it. Find your somethings to have hope and just hold on.

My Fibro Story

Since Fibromyalgia doesn't have a known cause, it's hard to say where my Fibro story started. However, there was a time I definitely knew something was wrong...

When I was 22, very close to celebrating 23, and away at college I woke up one day and realized I felt like I had never slept at all. I was exhausted. I dragged all through my classes and activities that day until I finally was able to sleep and get rest. Except I woke up the next day again feeling like I hadn't gotten any sleep.

Soon I was falling asleep in class, feeling awful, and struggling to focus on homework and assignments, even to comprehend what I was reading in my textbooks. [That fatigue and fogginess in thinking and concentrating has continued. Some times are worse than others]

After a week of this I knew something was wrong. No amount of sleep changed how I felt. I finally went to the doctors and they took a number of tests. At the end they told me I was perfectly healthy and nothing was wrong. Have you ever wanted to throw a total tantrum but as an adult? So wanted to here! I still felt awful so I knew something was wrong!

There is nothing worse than waking up one day feeling awful and, as time goes on, realizing that your body has betrayed you. If you have never experienced this for some kind of debilitating condition, illness, or disease it is difficult to convey the horror, confusion, and grief this makes you feel.

A few years went by while I met my husband and got married (one of the best decisions of my life!), I started my masters in counseling (also one of the best!), and still- no matter how much sleep I got I felt exhausted. Eventually, after reading online, I figured that I had chronic fatigue. I had a lot of the same symptoms. I still went for tests every so often as things seemed to get worse. The tests still came back saying I was perfectly healthy.

At this point my husband tentatively suggested that perhaps since the tests said nothing was wrong then maybe nothing was wrong? I responded with exploding, responding that I felt awful and it was in no way normal to feel this way. He learned to keep those kind of thoughts to himself. :) I learned to not respond badly when someone asks a logical question, even if it's upsetting.

I worked at an independent bookstore for several years around this time.

 
I learned that one of my co-workers had Fibromyalgia. She would occasionally call out sick the morning of work, need help lifting the boxes, and other little things like that. I remember thinking a little ungraciously the third time in a row I was working and she called out sick, then finding out later that she had been gardening (one of her favorite hobbies) or something a little more physically strenuous.

If I could talk to her now I would tell her, "I soooo get it now! I am so sorry I ever thought anything ungraciously and wish I could have thought to make it easier for you." Because it is hard. It is hard to get out of bed, and hard to resist doing something you love, even knowing you might pay for it later in pain and stiffness.

A couple years later (and a lot of difficult nights and foggy days) we decided we wanted to have kids and I gave birth to our son.

[Actual picture of our newborn son- Reilly Christopher]

Now, my son is wonderful! But the process of birth and recovering afterwards was awful. I was completely wiped out physically from the pain. I was drained mentally and emotionally from fatigue. I developed Post Partum Depression, which kept me in a constant state of stress and emotional distress. Reilly's whole first year is probably the worse year of my life so far because of all this. Reilly himself is the best part of that year!

If you've read my post about what Fibro is, you will have noted that one of the risk factors is physical trauma. I believe that the pain of giving birth ramped everything up. I started having pains in my hands and feet. My arms and legs would tingle periodically in a way that itched and drove me crazy. I had a hard time even walking because it was painful. My hips began giving me trouble. It felt like I was developing Rheumatoid Arthritis in all the major joints and all those in my hands and feet.

 As this year went on, I began feeling trapped in my body and wanted desperately to either have my body work properly and let me feel right, or to not be in my body anymore. Please understand, it isn't that I wanted to die. I was not suicidal. I just didn't want to be in my body anymore because I was so tired (having a newborn didn't help with that!) and so tired of hurting and not knowing why.

After a couple months I was able to go to an RA doctor, and received the orders for another series of tests. However, this time I got a diagnosis back- Fibromyalgia. Finally, after 7 years, I had gotten a doctor that both had the knowledge and took the time to really listen and figure out what was wrong!

It was both relieving and depressing. Relieving because I finally had a definite diagnoses in which everything I was going through made sense! Depressing because I already knew that Fibro was a lifelong condition and there was no cure for how I was feeling- I hadn't wanted that reality.

It took a while to completely come to terms with having Fibromyalgia and how different my life would be with it. More of that in this post.