It Eventually Gets Better, Without Any Sort Of Explanation; You Just Wake Up One Morning And You’re

That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a collective loss of normalcy.

Understanding the stages of grief is a start. But whenever I talk about the stages of grief, I have to remind people that the stages aren’t linear and may not happen in this order. It’s not a map but it provides some scaffolding for this unknown world.

Grief counseling is something I have found hugely beneficial for dealing with the inconsistencies and unpredictability of living with multiple chronic illnesses. It was suggested to me by my therapist, who realized that my rapid cycling emotions weren’t just due to the ADHD, but because I was also constantly in a state of perpetual grieving; grieving for my past self who suffered and endured, for my current self still going through it, and for my future self, and a future that will forever be steeped in uncertainty.

I will always be in a state of grieving, because the stages of grief are not linear, and even after you reach the stage of acceptance, you will always carry some shard of the experience with you. In my case it’s less a shard, and more my entire existence. I live in a perpetual state of open-ended uncertainty. 

And now, so does everyone else.

You are grieving, both for the things going on right now, and the things we anticipate that will happen as a result. You are grieving, and that’s okay, you need to experience these emotions and process them. You are not being irrational, you are not being weak. You are being human.

Be kind to yourselves. This will pass. It will pass like the kidney stone of an angry god pissing vengeance into the wind. But it will pass. 

tips n tricks for cool kids Add your own tips if you got em!

being in love with the process and not the results is one of the healthiest things in the world

i went out to the cinema with my mum and my friend yesterday and i was pretty fine i didnt rlly struggle with it like i thought i would when a few hours before leaving i felt physically ill and extremely exhausted just because i knew it was coming. and now i feel like im spiraling im dissociated and i feel like im faking everything because how can i be mentally ill when i left the house for the first time in weeks and was fine? does it mean im faking?

Hello anon! No, that definitely doesn’t mean you’re faking.

I can think of a couple different things that might explain it.

Anticipatory anxiety

It sounds like your anxiety before the event was worse than it was during it.

Sometimes, the wait before a distressing thing can be much harder than actually going through it. That’s common, and it’s an okay way to feel. (In fact, for me personally, that’s the main way my anxiety presents itself.)

Modifying factors

Maybe you felt comfortable, because your mom and your friend were there.

Maybe you were enjoying the cinema so much, you didn’t feel distressed.

Maybe after all the anxiety beforehand, you were just too exhausted to freak out anymore.

Or maybe you were slightly dissociated – just enough to take the edge off and allow you to function semi-normally.

Symptoms can vary from day to day

The thing about our brains & minds is that they don’t really follow any rules. They just do whatever works best in the moment.

And what works best can vary a lot from day to day. Sometimes it’s easier (or harder) to cope, due to other factors. So your symptoms or issues can fluctuate, too.

That doesn’t mean “nothing’s wrong with you” – it doesn’t mean your mental illness is imaginary, or that it’s disappeared. And it doesn’t mean you’re faking.

It just means that on this day, for some reason that may or may not be obvious, you were able to handle that outing more easily than you expected.

That’s not a guarantee that you’ll always be able to do it so easily, and other people shouldn’t assume it is.

The best we can do is look at our patterns over time, try to understand what conditions are best for us – what we need in order to function best & be happy – and work on feeling okay giving that to ourselves.

Rebound dissociation

Earlier in my life, I’d dissociate under stress.

But in some situations, it was more protective to fawn and comply. So while I was there, I’d act super friendly, engaged and responsive, for hours at a time.

And as soon as I got out of the situation, I’d shut down and dissociate completely. I couldn’t move, talk, or think. Once my stress level was low enough to tolerate, I’d “come down” from the dissociation.

At first, I resisted the shutdown because it was terrifying and silent and awful. But when I stopped fighting it, I found myself recovering more quickly, because I wasn’t adding to the stress. So I started thinking of it as “resting” and “re-stabilizing.”

A similar thing still happens when I get overstimulated by light, noise, or other people’s emotions: I naturally withdraw into myself until I can regroup.

It’s possible you also experienced that during/after the cinema.

You might have been overwhelmed by sensory stuff from being in public, other people’s feelings and reactions, or your own feelings. Or maybe you were just totally exhausted.

Dissociation is a coping mechanism

The important thing to know is that dissociation is a self-protective act. It’s not always the BEST coping mechanism you could use, but it is one, and it works. It shields you from overwhelming feelings until you have the resources to deal with them.

If you’re dissociating, it’s probably because you’re having a hard time right now.

That’s the bottom line. So when you’re ready to take care of your feelings, anything you can do to help yourself feel calmer, comforted, soothed, and grounded, isgoing to help.

It may not feel comfortable at first – after all, when you’re dissociated, it’s because you’re afraid to feel – but if you’re ready to come back to yourself, then go ahead, even though it feels awkward and hard. You’ll be okay.

When you find yourself dissociated, try and be gentle with yourself. Don’t judge or hate on yourself for it. Just be a little nicer than usual. Take care of yourself and your poor stressed-out brain.

You can take a nap, do a nice sensory thing like a scented bath or shower, cuddle with a pet, listen to music that you love, give yourself a hand or foot massage, write in a journal, do a guided meditation, or anything that you find restorative and calming.

Basically, anything that reminds you “hey, sometimes being in the moment actually feels okay.”

Right now, it’s probably really hard, but that doesn’t mean it will be this way forever. Over time, you’ll be able to handle it more easily and comfortably. 

Thanks for writing to me, and I hope you feel much better soon! <3

Apologies for the format and need to zoom, but I thought this response was wonderful

Hey, I just want everyone to know that what the world is going through is a legitimate trauma. Full on. It fits the “official” definition and everything. This is a traumatic event.

That means that it’s normal and expected to find yourself using coping mechanisms that you thought you were done with, to find yourself numbed out, to be on the verge of constant panic attacks, to be acting impulsively and compulsively, to engage in very old patterns, to have wide swings of every behaviour especially regarding sleep, food, and sex.

The research shows that people in a traumatic situation who most often develop PTSD (which I would say we are all at risk of) or have their existing PTSD/C-PTSD intensified are folks who cannot or believe they cannot do anything about it the trauma event.

So, if you are able, look for a place in all of this where you can feel that you can do something. Harass a company not doing enough for its employees, sign a petition, check in on a neighbour, set alarms to remind yourself to eat (it’s on my own to do list for today), intentionally spend time every day doing straw breathing to shift your sympathetic nervous system response. You don’t have to become some social media hero, or spend all your time improving yourself. But if you can find something that makes you feel like you can do something for yourself that decreases the trauma load on you, it will greatly benefit you going forward.

If anyone has any questions about this, my asks are open, or you can message me. (I cannot do any online therapy, I am happy to share information about trauma itself and any tools that I know)

It is okay to reblog this.

- Registered Clinical Counsellor, with 10+ years specifically working with trauma

Digging deeper into AvPD.

(Part of my ongoing series of posts on Avoidant Personality Disorder.)

AvPD is focused on controlling anxiety, like an anxiety disorder.

It's self-reinforcing, like an anxiety disorder.

That’s what I wrote this other post about. But it’s more than just anxiety.

Because it also affects your life universally -- in practically every situation.

It affects your self-perception universally.

It prevents you from forming healthy relationships.

It affects your ability to feel your emotions.

And it’s rooted in shame.

The hallmark of AvPD is a fear of exposure.

A fear of being seen or known by others. You fear that happening because you feel inadequate, flawed, defective. Ashamed.

If someone sees who you really are, what you’re really like, and they mock or devalue or criticize you -- if they point out how flawed and messed up you are -- you’ll be thrown right into those feelings. It will (says the disorder) “become true.”

And experiencing that shame is so excruciating, you distance yourself from all your feelings in order to escape. (Feelings are an all-or-nothing deal.)

But as a result of being detached from your emotions, it’s hard for you to relate to people normally.

You feel like a fake, like you are just simulating what a Real Person™ should be doing in this situation. This is exhausting beyond words. Interacting doesn’t come naturally, because you don’t quite feel anything.

If you’re anything like me though, you are lowkey suffering 100% of the time.

You might feel like at any moment, you could explode and start screaming and never stop.

You want someone to notice, and care that you’re hurting and so so lonely, but you also want no one to pay attention to you ever because it is so agonizing to be seen.

And if you manage to get past that, you probably think your feelings are so unimportant, you shouldn’t bother anyone else with them. Trying to tell someone about what you’re experiencing just makes you want to cringe.

Or worse, it makes you want to slip into a terrifying blankness, with a vacant smile and deflection: “so how are you?”

This feels like dying. Which is not really so far from the truth.

But possibly the worst part is, you might not even be able to express what’s wrong. You just know: it hurts. You’re miserable. You want it to stop.

(Which doesn’t sound real or reasonable enough to tell to another person, for goodness’ sake. So you don’t.)

Living in avoidance really means fading out of existence.

It means exerting all your energy to make yourself an un-person. To make yourself so passive, so still -- so inert -- almost invisible, like the clearest water: all an observer can see is a slight reflection of themself on the surface. Everything about you is neutralized.

And this is the opposite of what we are here to do. What we’re here to be.

We’re meant to be vivid, powerful people -- we are meant to be connected.

We are meant to be whole.

And that is how we can recover, to reconnect with ourselves. Believe in wholeness!

Every part of AvPD is just the most rational, sensible reaction to believing that you’re fundamentally flawed, and that connecting with others isn’t safe.

And (while people debate about whether or not you can “recover” from a personality disorder) I firmly believe that the things you’ve learned, can be un-learned.

This is where it starts!

Provence