Sunday, November 15, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
PTSD Forum on About.com
About.com offers an informative website and forum for people who suffer from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). There you can find information on:
You can also sign up for their newsletter here.
Reading through one of their articles on Managing Emotions, I was happy to find that much of what they said resonates with what I have learned through my own journey.
It was particularly interesting for me to learn that women who experienced physical abuse in childhood had a 48.5% chance of developing PTSD in adulthood.
The section on Coping Strategies looks really good.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Practical Steps Towards Decreasing Depression
If you have severe depression like I have then it can be difficult to do anything. Depression can be further exacerbated by unrealistically high expectations and constantly shifting your focus.
The first step towards treating depression is to realize and accept that you have depression - so say it out loud, "I have depression." It isn't permanent and it isn't for life - it's just a state of mind. It's like your mind has a virus and it's making all your thoughts negative. The only way you can kill the virus is by identifying those bad thoughts, recognizing that they are only the depression talking and gradually changing the way you think by focusing on positive thoughts. The number one thing to realize when overcoming depression is that you are not your mind and that you cannot believe everything you think. I talk more about this in my blog post here where I discuss an important exercise assigned by my life coach Annelene Decaux.
But anyway, I'm getting away from the main purpose of this post. Even though we can think of ourselves as having a separate mind, body, emotions, and spirit - in truth, they are all connected. Therefore, we can't just focus on changing the way we think - we also have to take care of our physical body.
One of the worst aspects of depression is that it can be difficult to tell whether or not you're getting better. And when things are really bad - it can feel like you don't have enough energy to even get out of bed and perform basic human functions like eating, sleeping, and getting exercise. We need to be compassionate with ourselves and accept that in a state of depression we need to have reasonable expectations of ourselves - otherwise we'll feel like a failure. You need to be kind to yourself and have patience with yourself - just like you would have with a small child. In truth, showing patience and compassion to yourself is like recognizing your inner child and showing compassion to her/him.
Below, I provide a simple excel sheet that I use to track my progress in overcoming my depression. It focuses on basic human functions - healthy exercise, sleeping, and eating.
I have been focusing on these basic goals and they have helped me. I print out a new sheet every week and record my progress - then I save the sheet and when I accomplish all my goals for the day then I record that fact.
I view these goals as the main things that I have to accomplish every day to see my day as a success. When I have more energy then maybe I read, hang out with friends, write, work on projects, clean my house, or help out a friend. But at the very minimum, I strive to complete these goals every day. At first, there were many days that I could not even accomplish half the goals on this sheet, but I didn't beat myself up about it. Instead, I told myself - that's okay, you'll get there eventually. Every day is it's own opportunity. And every day that I completed all my goals - I would reward myself $1. With that dollar, I would use it towards buying an iTunes song that I enjoyed or saving it up to enjoy some other capricious desire. The point is that you should focus on rewarding yourself when you do a good job and telling yourself, "I'll do better tomorrow," when you have a rough day.
Let me elaborate a little bit more on why I chose this set of goals. After making it very clear to my behavioral psychologist that I was not comfortable taking any form of medication to treat my depression, she encouraged me to do one hour of vigorous exercise every day. My psychologist has a PhD and is very knowledgeable and well-read in the various treatments available for depression. She explained to me that an hour of vigorous exercise where you elevate your heart rate and really get your blood pumping fills your body with endorphins. These naturally created endorphins are sort of like a free form of anti-depressants without any of the negative side affects. She told me that even if I felt too awful to do anything else - that I should at least exercise for one hour a day. If you're not strong enough to exercise for one full hour - don't worry. Start with 15 or 30 minutes and gradually build up from there. In the section labeled "One hour of Exercise" record the amount of time you exercised and the activity.
The next section - stabilizing sleep patterns - I added because I noticed that my depression was causing me to sleep at all sorts of odd hours. Some days I would go to sleep at 4am and wake up at 6am. Other days I would sleep from 8pm to 11am. Some days I was awake all night and slept for the whole day. My entire sleeping schedule was destroyed. This was mainly because my "bad" episodes (where I would break down crying and my head would fill with bad memories) happened mainly at night. My lack of regular and restful sleep only intensified my feelings of paranoia, exhaustion, and weariness. Even during the worst of it - I knew that if I could just get on a better sleep cycle - things would get better for me, but it felt nearly impossible. At first, I just wanted to fix it all at once. I told myself - I would just set my alarm and get up at the same time no matter what. But this did not work, since my body craved sleep so badly that I would collapse from exhaustion eventually. I then decided to take a more reasonable approach and be more patient with myself. I realized and accepted that my body needed sleep and that the "bad" episodes needed to happen - they were a way to express and process my emotions. So I focused on getting 7-9 hours of sleep everyday. I decided that if I was aware of when I got to bed and when I got up, I could gradually move towards a more regular sleeping schedule. I also made it a point to incorporate other tenants of achieving better sleep that I had read about - no napping and no TV before bed. The point is that I didn't get angry at myself for not waking up at a certain time or falling asleep by a certain time. This took the pressure off of me. At night, I worked on activities that did not involve watching television (I usually read or wrote in my journal) and then I feel asleep when I was really sleepy. I did not set an alarm and I got up when I was rested.
The next part to the excel sheet "Eating Healthy" is a simple way to improve your diet, create good energy with which to exercise, and minimize stimulants that may keep you up at night. The "No Caffeine (Tea, Coffee, Soft Drinks, Energy Drinks, Energy Bars, etc), No Chocolate, Low Sugar" goals - are all designed to remove stimulants that are keeping you from sleeping and making you jittery, nervous, or tense. Completely removing caffeine and eating less sugar helped the most for me. I found it difficult to completely eliminate chocolate, but it helped to eat less of it and only eat it in the morning. Avoiding processed foods (junk food, canned foot, packaged foods, energy bars, health bars, heavily processed cereals, etc.) was very important as well. These foods don't provide good energy and they often have additional chemicals and excessive sodium, sugar, or caffeine that shock your system. I focused on eating regularly spaced meals and made sure to include a vegetable, fruit, and a bit of protein with every meal. This is very simple - it can be a carrot, an apple, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Or maybe a banana, bit of salad, and a handful of nuts. Or a pear, some red pepper slices, and some eggs. Since I was so depressed - I didn't have much energy, so at first I focused on making simple, quick meals. Gradually, as I felt better, I created tastier and more complicated meals. One relatively easy meal that can last you several days is lentil soup with vegetables. I use french green lentils and add carrots, broccoli, potatoes, onions, garlic, red peppers, etc. I put everything in a crock pot with a timer and let it cook for 6-8 hours. The timer is key, since the crock pot will just turn off when it's done and you won't accidentally burn your food by forgetting about it, since you're so depressed. Once I felt better, I also tried to incorporate more variety into my meals by never having the same thing for breakfast, lunch, or dinner two days in a row. I find that this has really helped.
The next step is tracking "bad" or unpleasant episodes. The idea here is not eliminate these episodes entirely because in many ways they are a necessary way to process your emotions. Rather, the idea is to recognize patterns - like how many bad episodes are you having; when do they happen most frequently; is there anything in particular that triggers them; how do you try to deal with them when they do happen; what works and what doesn't work when you experience an onslaught of emotions, etc. You don't need to be angry with yourself when you have a "bad" episode by experiencing a flashback or breaking down crying or just feeling completely awful and enraged for a while. These are all part of the healing process. The idea is to become more aware of ourselves - of our body and our emotions. When you have a bad episode - you want to be able to stop, accept that you are feeling bad, acknowledge that you are feeling bad, and then honor that emotion in a health way - by crying, writing, talking, screaming, singing, punching a pillow, etc. You will gradually find that by quickly accepting and embracing your "bad" episodes that they will pass by more quickly. As my life coach Annelene Decaux explained to me, depression is just a form of stuck energy inside of you - stuck emotions that need to be recognized, expressed, released, and learned from.
The next section, "One hour of Mindfulness," is to make you more aware of your spiritual practice. One of the mistakes that people who suffer from depression regularly make is that they forget and stop doing what helped them get through their depression in the first place. All the things that we learn to do to help ourselves through depression like yoga, journal writing, meditation, self-acknowledgment exercises, etc, are things that we need to continue doing and integrate into our daily lives. We will need to do them less or less frequently than when we were super depressed, but we still need to do them. They will help us be the best person that we can be and will prevent us from developing extreme depression again.
Finally, the "notes" section is a good place to record observations, random thoughts, or whatever you want. Sometimes I just put a big smiley face in this section and other times I make an insightful comment on something I learned that day about myself.
So print out this excel sheet, modify it to make your own, or whatever! You may find it especially useful to compile your week-by-week results in an excel file to keep track of your progress. You can also share your progress with your therapist, spiritual healer, mentor, or a trusted friend. Okay, here is a big virtual hug and good luck! We will overcome our depression - remember, depression is just a state of mind and it can be overcome!
Monday, November 9, 2009
The Purpose of This Blog - To Help Those with Depression and PTSD
I write in this blog to help other people like me who suffer from depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). My PTSD is due to childhood trauma, so other people who have experienced childhood trauma may find it particularly impactful. That being said, there are many resources that I talk about that can also serve the needs of sufferers of PTSD due to rape, a severe event, war veterans, a traumatic event, etc.
I focus particularly on methods of healing that are free of narcotics or other pain masking drug treatments. The methods I have learned may take longer and require more dedication and energy than popping a pill, but I can promise you that they are the only true way through and out to the other side.
I know how crippling a state of mind depression can be and I want you to know that that's all it really is in the end - a state of mind. The first time I heard this, I denied it because I thought the message was to ignore my pain and ignore those things that had been bothering me, but that's not the message. The message is that depression is like a virus in your mind that may have begun from legitimate pain that you have failed to recognize for so long that it has taken over, so you can't believe everything your mind comes up with. The key is to recognize your pain, accept it, honor it, and take the necessary steps to change your life. You are smart - your body, mind, emotions, spirit - are smart. You cannot ignore what they are trying to tell you. It will not just go away and pain medication will not solve it for you. You need to address the problems in your life and make the necessary changed inside of you, outside of you, with the people in your life, and in your community/environment to make yourself better.
Finally, I would like to share a quote with you that inspires me; it is from the book, The Wisdom of the Enneagram,
"Always remember that it is your birthright and natural state to be wise and noble, loving and generous, to esteem yourself and others, to be creative and constantly renewing yourself, to be engaged in the world in awe and in depth, to have courage and to rely on yourself, to be joyous and effortlessly accomplished, to be strong and effective, to enjoy peace of mind and to be present in the unfolding mystery of your life."
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Great Articles Supporting the Power of Meditation
Here are some great articles supporting the power of meditation. For generations, meditation in its various forms has been used to bring focus away from the mind and into the needs of the present body.
These articles were forwarded to me by Annelene Decaux, my life coach/spiritual healer/career coach who I highly recommend.
Free Guided Imagery Audio Recording
If you're skeptical about guided imagery audio recordings then check out this free download. It's for stress relief and relaxation. It's a little shorter than most guided imagery audio recordings - it's only 15 minutes, but even 15 minutes can make a big difference if you're really stressed out.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Framily – A Family Made of Friends; Not Blood Lines
Framily = (Fr)iends + F(amily)
For many of us who are survivors of childhood trauma, we gradually learn that we must rely more on our good friends than on our families. I grew up being told that blood runs thicker than water, but this is simply not true. Although it may be true that in some individual’s experience their parent, sibling, or child is the most meaningful relationship in their life; this is not the case for everyone.
It took me a long time to accept that the love that one is taught to expect to find through their mother and father is something that I would have to find elsewhere. Part of the problem is that I lived in the land of “should have” and it created in me a deep sense of bitterness, resentment, and injustice. Rather than accepting the dysfunctional family I had and coming to terms with that reality, I focused on the family I felt I deserved and was somehow being denied – the one I should have. This was a sure path towards disillusionment and depression, but I didn’t realize it at the time.
Accepting that my good friends would be my family was the first step towards feeling less alone in the world. But the next step was harder – identifying which friends I could count on to see me through tough times. Most friends are not cut out to fill the role of framily because they are either unable or unwilling. Friends with healthy family relationships have a harder time understanding the pain, fear, and sense of injustice associated with growing up in an abusive and dysfunctional family. And even if they want to help, because they have not suffered as much, they do not have a highly adept sense of empathy or compassion, and thus cannot truly help you in the way that you need them to.
When identifying which friends will be in your framily try to pick friends who have gone through similar experiences or have a high degree of emotional intelligence. Look for friends who are slightly senior to you and more mature because they have already processed many of the emotions and turmoil that you are experiencing and they can help you learn through their own experiences. I have a couple of friends who have acted as great mentors to me. Both of them are women who are about five years older than me. They went through much the same experience that I am currently going through and can relate on a deeper level than any other friends or professionals that I have spoken with. They are also both very successful and strong women and knowing that they have had similar experiences and thoughts gives me strength and hope because I know that I can get better just like them. Once you are more mature and wiser, add younger friends who you can mentor and share your experience with in order to help them triumph over their sense of despair and depression.
Picking framily over family doesn’t mean that you won’t have any contact or some form of a relationship with your family – it just means that when you’re in crises or in need, you know that you must turn to your framily. Many people choose to maintain an artificial relationship with their family out of a sense of duty, sense of tradition, love, compassion, etc, and that is a choice for each individual. We should not judge a person who decides to maintain some sort of relationship with their relatives – even if it is inauthentic. And by the same token, we should not judge a person who decides to cut all ties with any and all relatives. However, if you observe that a good friend is suffering because of their family relationships or lack thereof then in the right moment, it can be helpful to gently point out that this may be a source of pain for them and remind them that they have a choice – they have free will and a right to find joy. But don’t go further than pointing out that this may be the case – each person is responsible for her or his self and sometimes all we can really do for our good friends at the end of the day is give them a big hug.
For many of us who are survivors of childhood trauma, we gradually learn that we must rely more on our good friends than on our families. I grew up being told that blood runs thicker than water, but this is simply not true. Although it may be true that in some individual’s experience their parent, sibling, or child is the most meaningful relationship in their life; this is not the case for everyone.
It took me a long time to accept that the love that one is taught to expect to find through their mother and father is something that I would have to find elsewhere. Part of the problem is that I lived in the land of “should have” and it created in me a deep sense of bitterness, resentment, and injustice. Rather than accepting the dysfunctional family I had and coming to terms with that reality, I focused on the family I felt I deserved and was somehow being denied – the one I should have. This was a sure path towards disillusionment and depression, but I didn’t realize it at the time.
Accepting that my good friends would be my family was the first step towards feeling less alone in the world. But the next step was harder – identifying which friends I could count on to see me through tough times. Most friends are not cut out to fill the role of framily because they are either unable or unwilling. Friends with healthy family relationships have a harder time understanding the pain, fear, and sense of injustice associated with growing up in an abusive and dysfunctional family. And even if they want to help, because they have not suffered as much, they do not have a highly adept sense of empathy or compassion, and thus cannot truly help you in the way that you need them to.
When identifying which friends will be in your framily try to pick friends who have gone through similar experiences or have a high degree of emotional intelligence. Look for friends who are slightly senior to you and more mature because they have already processed many of the emotions and turmoil that you are experiencing and they can help you learn through their own experiences. I have a couple of friends who have acted as great mentors to me. Both of them are women who are about five years older than me. They went through much the same experience that I am currently going through and can relate on a deeper level than any other friends or professionals that I have spoken with. They are also both very successful and strong women and knowing that they have had similar experiences and thoughts gives me strength and hope because I know that I can get better just like them. Once you are more mature and wiser, add younger friends who you can mentor and share your experience with in order to help them triumph over their sense of despair and depression.
Picking framily over family doesn’t mean that you won’t have any contact or some form of a relationship with your family – it just means that when you’re in crises or in need, you know that you must turn to your framily. Many people choose to maintain an artificial relationship with their family out of a sense of duty, sense of tradition, love, compassion, etc, and that is a choice for each individual. We should not judge a person who decides to maintain some sort of relationship with their relatives – even if it is inauthentic. And by the same token, we should not judge a person who decides to cut all ties with any and all relatives. However, if you observe that a good friend is suffering because of their family relationships or lack thereof then in the right moment, it can be helpful to gently point out that this may be a source of pain for them and remind them that they have a choice – they have free will and a right to find joy. But don’t go further than pointing out that this may be the case – each person is responsible for her or his self and sometimes all we can really do for our good friends at the end of the day is give them a big hug.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Another Free Yoga Video Online - Yoga is Medicine for Depression
The main website is called:
www.myyogaonline.com There are many yoga webisodes for sale. For a free full-length sample - please refer to the google video here. I tried to embed the video into my blogpost, but it wasn't working.
www.myyogaonline.com There are many yoga webisodes for sale. For a free full-length sample - please refer to the google video here. I tried to embed the video into my blogpost, but it wasn't working.
Yoga is a Great form of Therapy for Depression or PTSD
Yoga is a great medicine for depression or post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Depression can make you feel completely apathetic and disinterested in life - it can also make you feel physically weak and exhausted. Yoga is a low-impact form of exercise and meditation that can be very therapeutic when you're feeling okay and amazing when you're feeling really depressed.
Yoga makes you more aware of your own body and especially your breathing - this forces your attention away from the world in your mind, into the present...and that's what being mindful, aware, and living in the "now" is all about.
Yoga can also be a good group activity where you can interact with other people in a low-stress and compassionate environment. It might even help you meet friends or mentors who are more empathetic and encouraging than the people you currently associate with. Going to a yoga class with a teacher and group can be helpful because a good teacher can improve your technique and doing yoga with other people around you can be inspiring and invigorating.
If you are so depressed that you're afraid of leaving the comfort and protection of your own home - don't despair. There are many free resources online and many instructional dvds for purchase. Here is a free online tutorial that look good:
http://www.yoga-poses-and-beyond.com/index.html
Yoga is for everyone! Each yoga pose is designed to be built on, so you start with the most basic poses and then build on them. Don't be afraid! And remember - yoga is not a competition - yoga is about centering yourself and showing love to your own body by giving it your full attention as you relax, stretch, and strengthen every fiber in your body.
Here is another free yoga video online:
And here is another free yoga video available online here.
If you don't like the style of the yoga videos then feel free to look for more online. Google video has a list of available yoga videos.
Yoga makes you more aware of your own body and especially your breathing - this forces your attention away from the world in your mind, into the present...and that's what being mindful, aware, and living in the "now" is all about.
Yoga can also be a good group activity where you can interact with other people in a low-stress and compassionate environment. It might even help you meet friends or mentors who are more empathetic and encouraging than the people you currently associate with. Going to a yoga class with a teacher and group can be helpful because a good teacher can improve your technique and doing yoga with other people around you can be inspiring and invigorating.
If you are so depressed that you're afraid of leaving the comfort and protection of your own home - don't despair. There are many free resources online and many instructional dvds for purchase. Here is a free online tutorial that look good:
http://www.yoga-poses-and-beyond.com/index.html
Yoga is for everyone! Each yoga pose is designed to be built on, so you start with the most basic poses and then build on them. Don't be afraid! And remember - yoga is not a competition - yoga is about centering yourself and showing love to your own body by giving it your full attention as you relax, stretch, and strengthen every fiber in your body.
Here is another free yoga video online:
And here is another free yoga video available online here.
If you don't like the style of the yoga videos then feel free to look for more online. Google video has a list of available yoga videos.