Is It Too Late To Be A Healthy Mom?
It's never too late...
Today was photo day for my boy, James. He’ll be leaving in two weeks. He’ll be gone for two years to Nicaragua. Today I watched him sitting in his suit, posing, and smiling. His whole life is ahead of him and the worst of the world is behind both of us.
I remember a time when I wondered if he’d be okay. I wondered if he’d be messed up because of my bipolar swings between suicidal fury, delusional mania, and black velvet depression. I wondered how he’d ever grow to be ‘normal’ when all I could do is confirm to him that nothing in the world is certain…nothing predictable, nothing safe, nothing joyful.
Thank Heaven for the miracle of discovery! I started the turn around when James was three-and-a-half. His earliest developmental years were certainly a mess of inconsistency on one level, neglect on another, but it wasn’t too late to make things different. I tried through both stages of healing to make things right.
It’s never too late embrace healthy.
If you are a mom who has struggled with moods and manias, don’t lose hope. It’s never too late for your kids to have a healthy mother. You can follow thousands of others and use the principles of first and second stage healing to get healthy, find balance, forgive the illness and become who you really want to be.
James gave an interview on the weekend. He sat, lit up, with cameras rolling and told about how he has watched me grow, over our nineteen years together, into a healthy person. My twinge of guilt for the first years was quickly overridden with happiness for the years that we have shared, after my illness. Healthy did not come all at once, but James has witnessed the worst and the best of me. In a way, we have grown up together…
It’s okay to grow up with your children…
I would never have signed up for that either, Grandpa.
I am the third generation of a mood swing mess, peppered with paranoia and salted with a stigma so smothering that it killed my mother and grandfather.
My mother sits on her father's knee
When Grandpa was diagnosable, in his early twenties, America was in the shameful throws of sterilizing ‘mental deficients’ and performing frontal lobe lobotomies for mood swing resolution. I would never have signed up for that either, Grandpa. Grandpa kept his illness a not-so-well-kept secret until he finally, in an act of shame and desperation, used medication to kill himself. He was about 50 when he died.
My mother suffered in silence and with the delusion that she was alone with her tortured self. She tried drug treatments off and on but an admission of illness was more than she could bear. Being “a Manic-Depressive” marred her family name and shamed her with the fear that all the world would know they were “not right in the head.” She was medicated when she committed suicide. She was only 40 years old.
I accepted a diagnosis of bipolar as soon as my doctor said it. I was twenty, a new mom, and out from under the family influence. My mother was angry with me for doing it, but I took all the medications that my doctors prescribed and fared no better. After my mother died, I tried 13 different meds, some long term hospitalization, and was told to go have my tubes tied because I would never be well. Then, mercifully and miraculously, I took my place in the unravelling of an incredible medical discovery, made by my dad and another layman from Southern Alberta, Canada. I was torn from the grips of stigma and shame and lifted off the mood swing when micronutrient deficiency was discovered as the source of my symptoms.
People are still dying for shame over what the world thinks is an incurable disease. But, what in Grandpa’s generation was once worthy of torture and sterilization, then in Mom’s generation, managed with life-long benzodiazepine addiction; what was once a shameful death sentence, is now a manageable issue of micronutrient balance and mood control. My generation will deal with post-acute-withdrawal syndrome as we overcome our addictions to benzodiazepines. We’ll go through the messy discontinuation syndrome as we give up our SSRI ‘happy pills.’
I did it for my children.
The world is changing once more. My children talk about mood swings and mental health with about as much shame as the common cold can wield. In our home, we know what to do about the mood swings…still working on that cure for the common cold!
You are a new generation.
New Life Without Stigma
A Happy Family Valentine
Today is Valentine’s Day.
I stayed up late last night to decorate a surprise and woke early to put on a breakfast for my husband and children.
The excited chatter at the table turned to singing – literally. My children spontaneously broke out in a happy lilting version of a children’s song that I taught them as babies.
“As I have loved you…
Sugar for Breakfast!
Love one another…”
I laughed at nineteen-year-old James, and three sisters; Samantha, Melanie and Meagan, all singing a happy song about love in a family and following Christ’s example to be kind.
I sang along with them and Dana joined in, too, and it was really funny because after the singing and the giggling was over, Dana said he needed us all to know that in spite of the nice singing, that song was his least favorite in the whole world! He carried on with a story about a time when he was Meagan’s age, and he went to a church meeting where his father was a guest speaker. They asked Dana to sing. Dana’s father is an accomplished singer and plays piano beautifully, so he took his place at the piano and eight-year-old Dana stood at the pulpit. When little Dana stood and opened his mouth for the first note of “As I Have Loved You”, not a sound came out. They restarted the song a few times and still, not a sound would escape his throat! Mercifully, his father rose from the piano bench and gently escorted him from the pulpit, back to his seat.
Our kids thrill to hear happy, and even sad tales from our childhood years. Story telling at the table is one of our binding traditions and when we all participate, we love each other all the more.
Gosh, I love being a mom! I love being healthy and capable and strong and consistent. I love everything about family life, except mopping floors. I love every experience that has brought me to this place! I know in other posts I might seem negative about the early months of my healing because it was not easy, or quick or painless, but I hope my readers know that every painful overcoming moment or day or week has been worth it – a thousand times over – to get to this beautiful, happy place.
Decide to do whatever you must do; undo the damage, overcome the addiction, forgive the madness and accept the healing… It is so worth it to find your peace.
“How Did You Get Cured So Fast?”
Every once in awhile, I have a chuckle over comments from readers who wonder how it is that I ‘got better so fast’. I got better. SO much better that I can confidently say I have not had symptoms of bipolar for the last 15 years. But my recovery did not happen in the first 3 months… In fact, when I look back now, it was the better part of a year. See, the problem with setting a stopwatch on healing is that we never really know when the race is won. Researchers who have studied the EMPowerplus micronutrient formulation look for a positive response and have found some that register on a clinical scale in only a few days. But going from suicidal all of the time to suicidal only once this week, which looks great as data, may not register as total relief to the person who is still struggling with many other factors of a complicated diagnosis.
It’s time to get real. Here’s how my race for wellness began…
- Week One – day 3 I stopped hallucinating, stopped taking three of my five medications. (By the way, I thought it was really ‘much better’ not to be hearing and seeing troublesome faces in my peripheral vision; and when the perceived ‘hole in my chest closed up’, I was thrilled. If you haven’t read “A Promise of Hope” please do, it’ll make all of this make a lot more sense!)
- Week One – day 4 My paranoid, manic feelings subsided enough to be able to shower with all of my clothes off and without assistance from a family member. I was a lot better… but not well by any stretch.
- Week One – day 5 I was released from my father’s custody and allowed to go home to my husband and son. ( Is that ‘much better’? Does not needing 24-hour adult supervision mean that I was better? At least they weren’t thinking I’d kill myself at the first opportunity.)
- Week One – day 6-7 Terrible withdrawal set in. I felt worse than ever, but it was a new kind of bad.I had dropped several medications all at once and sat up nights crying, howling and thrashing until my ankles bled. There was also some vomit involved. If you are new to the transition phase, pray thanks because now, I’m told, amino acids, and other adjunct products recommended by Truehope, go a long way to quelling these symptoms and transition is not nearly as tough as it used to be. Still, “post-withdrawal” and “discontinuation syndrome” are scientifically proven to haunt those of us who go drug-free. Please read everything you can about these if you plan to discontinue an SSRI or a Benzodiazepine drug. Better yet, read about them before you ever start taking a drug in these classes.
- Week Two and Three I worked on slow reductions of the last two medications but was still not allowed to care for my child without another adult present because my moods were still very unpredictable and I could not stay awake all day.
- Week Three through Eight More medication reductions, withdrawals and cravings and an increasing desire to care for myself and for my son. I eventually resumed caring for him full time.
- March 28, 1996 I took my last dose of psychiatric medication and entered the next phase of healing.
So, in all, it took two months to get off the medication and to be stable enough to be trusted to be alone with my own child. I was not ‘all better’ very quickly. I still had a long way to go. But, if you had asked me how I was doing back in April of 1996, I would have told you I was so much better than I had been. (I didn’t know I could ever be as well as I am today!)
However, if I had come in expecting to get better quickly I would have been bitterly disappointed. Without any expectations for success, small improvements and living without the medications seemed miraculous.
Slowly, like a sunrise, stable moods, concentration and patience distilled on me. I became predictable and happy.
Sometimes I was sad and I begged my husband and my father to let me go back to the hospital because, without medication, remembering and feeling were really painful for me. I’m so glad they understood that I was healing and allowed me to work through painful things. They never gave up on me.
I got better. Easy? Nope. Fast? Hardly. Worth any effort? You’d better believe it!
Time passes either way, so why not pass it with a goal in mind? Why not find yourself next year, better than you were this year?
Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Bipolar, Panic and Anxiety…What is the Difference?
Take a minute to look at the DSM-IV – the manual that your physician used to determine the criteria for your diagnosis. Psychiatric diagnoses are complicated things. That’s why many of our diagnoses have changed over the years. Mine changed from depression to BipolarI, to BipolarI with rapid cycles, to a final and extra comforting label of BipolarI with rapid cycles and schizophrenic tendencies.
Did you know that I was so sick – even while diligently following my specialist’s order to use a five-drug cocktail – that I was no longer allowed to be alone with my toddler son? My husband and our families had to provide 24-hour-a-day babysitting services for me. They were sadly considering having me live in an institution. Instead, I recently celebrated my 20th wedding anniversary, and have the pleasure of raising my four healthy kids!
There is a pattern to healing.
First Stage Healing from bipolar symptoms is about responding to a chemistry crisis.
- You are devoted in the First Stage. You are taking the EMPowerplus micronutrient formulation so persistently that your friends think you’ve adopted a new religion.
- You are charting everything! You are on your myTruehope account documenting every up and down, bowel trouble, diet, sleep, panic habits and all your feelings because you are working hard to understand where you have been; and you want to get your life back.
- You are getting over addictions and becoming as stable as possible because you know you will need crystal clear thoughts for the Second Stage of healing from bipolar.
Second Stage Healing from bipolar symptoms is about resolving leftover symptoms. Most people entering Second Stage, around the third month of recovery, mention panic or anxiety as the most bothersome symptom they have. Did you know that panic and anxiety symptoms are NOT associated with a bipolar diagnosis? Check the DSM-IV summary here. So why do so many people experience panic and anxiety after they get through the First Stage?
There are two sources of Second Stage anxiety.
- Chemical Anxiety : Chemical anxiety is associated with protracted or long-term withdrawal from the medications you were once taking. The fact is, getting medications that are stored in your fat and lean muscle mass out of you for good, can take a long time. When bits of chemicals re-enter your bloodstream, they can affect you in numerous ways, including physical anxiety, sleeplessness and agitation. Protracted Withdrawal (also known as post withdrawal when you stop taking benzodiazepine meds,or discontinuation syndrome when you stop using an SSRI antidepressant,) is a scientifically proven after effect of having used psychiatric medications. Some relief has been found for those determined to go drug-free in the great adjunct treatments (like Inositol or Phosphatidyl Choline). Others, under the direction of a doctor, have remained on very small doses of the drug to avoid going through full withdrawal, but a recent evaluation of wellness has shown that people remaining on even small amounts of medication do not enjoy the same mental clarity that other EMPowerplus users report.
- Real Life Anxiety: Most of us who suffer with panic have had pretty good reasons to feel the way we do. Here are six circumstances that used to cause panic in me. (When I feel panic I feel numb in my arms and face, I get a flu-like feeling over my body and my heart races and skips.)
- Driving by a hospital
- Walking into a hospital
- Standing in a hospital
- Sitting in a hospital
- Talking to a doctor in a white coat
- Asking to use a bathroom in a hospital
Decide to be aware and discover:
- Which of your anxious moments are rooted in reality and which are likely chemical because you just discontinued an SSRI or a benzodiazepine?
- Do you need an adjunct supplement like Inositol or the Truehope Staffer’s favorite, Phosphatidyl Choline to help you calm the physical effects of anxiety while you wait out the withdrawal or work out your new reality?
- Remember, you can’t treat a chemical imbalance with counseling, but if , after the chemistry is no longer an issue, you discover that the root of the anxiety is a habit of panic formed around real memories or trauma; you can short circuit the symptom with acknowledgement, logic, and understanding. (Learn more about my favorite methods on the post called Defining Second Stage Healing.)
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