Thank this community and all of you

Dancerat

Member
I posted awhile ago about my difficult child and things have gotten better in some ways and worse in others. I have tried to detach, but am not as successful as some others here are. It's a journey, I guess. Two step forward, one step back. But what I really want to say is that I pretty much come here once a week and feel such a connection with all of the people here. It's so difficult to explain what this is like with friends and family is just sometimes part of the problem. I find myself acting like a crazy person sometimes. I was in the laundry room last night having a full blown one sided conversation with my son ( who wasn't there ) complete with profanity and disgust, and as I was coming up the stairs with laundry, my husband said, "Who were you TALKING to??" And I thought to myself, OMG, this is what schizophrenics must feel like.
So this forum is a blessing of sorts. And just... Thank you all.
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Dancerat? I have had some of my most productive conversations while the object under discussion was far and safely away.

That is the only way I can vent at the level I need to, to get some kind of hold on my emotions.

This is a hard thing we are doing, Dancerat. We each find our own ways of ordering our chaotic thoughts and of making sense of what is happening to us, and to our children.

We are confused, we are scared, we are angry. For the most part, we are alone with those feelings. In the morning, we bury them and go around functioning as though our lives were not falling down around us. My husband was like yours too, during the worst of it. He would watch me so closely, to see that I was okay, to be sure that I was upright.

So, I made an effort to look like I was upright for him, too.

But we need those times when we don't have to be alright, when we can grieve or rage or whatever it is we need to do. I learned to make those times for myself. A locked bathroom door and a tub of steaming water. The laundry room ~ oh, what would I have done without that laundry room! Or, I would run until I started to cry ~ anything, anything to get those feelings out where I could see them.

I used to pound pillows until I could feel my feelings about what was happening.

All these things I did at a time of my choosing, so that I was alone...but I made sure to do them. It was part of my self care routine, accessing that anger, that grief or rage or puzzlement.

That talk you had with your son was a necessary part of your own healing, Dancerat. He wasn't the one who needed to hear it.

You needed to hear it, needed to hear yourself say it.

We need to honor ourselves and our pain, Dancerat, if we hope to survive it. We are moving through loss, through a kind of devastation most people never even suspect exists. We need to develop a whole new set of survival skills just to make it through the day.

You did a good and healthy thing, Dancerat. With pain at this level? We may claim the right to talk to ourselves, right out loud, with impunity.

:O)

Cedar
 
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