Mood Disorders

Those who follow this blog have seen me rail against toxic positivity. When it’s not absurd, it’s insulting to those of us with mood disorders. No, we can’t just cheer up. If we could look at the bright side, we wouldn’t have depression or anxiety. You may be able to choose happiness, but I can’t. I’ve needed medication and therapy just to feel meh at times. If I could turn bipolar disorder off like a light switch, don’t you think I’d do it?

Toxic positivity can be seen nearly everywhere, in a lot of different situations: the self-help movement, of course, but also business, medicine, and even religion – as well as endless memes. American society is rife with toxic positivity. It appears in motivational business conventions and TED Talks. Salespeople are advised to think positively and envision success. Breast cancer survivors are advised to keep a positive attitude, to the extent that they are encouraged to tell how the disease has had a positive effect on their lives and relationships. (Expressions of fear, anger, and other natural emotions in response to the diagnosis are downplayed or discouraged.) Religions can exhort us to count our blessings or “manifest” our wants and needs by using positive thoughts to attract them.

Positivity becomes toxic when it is seen as the only method of coping with problems in life, even ones that have other solutions or none. Toxic positivity presents relentless cheer as the only acceptable reaction and a panacea for every difficulty. And toxic positivity leads people to demand that others take up the mindset and apply it to every situation, even devastating ones. As such, it denies the reality of human suffering and normal emotional responses. It’s a form of non-acceptance.

So, what is the alternative? What is a more natural – but still effective – technique for dealing with difficulties? How can those of us who have mood disorders or any other brain illness find ways to navigate through life without slapping on a smile and coercing our emotions to fit a certain mold?

Radical acceptance is one answer. Radical acceptance means that you accept your inner feelings and your outward circumstances as they are, especially if they are not under your control. You acknowledge reality without trying to impose a set of emotional mandates on it. Your acceptance and acknowledgment may involve pain or discomfort, but those are understandable, normal human conditions. They are natural conditions that evoke a natural response.

Rooted in Buddhist teachings and given a name by Marsha Linehan, the psychologist who developed dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), radical acceptance uses mindfulness to help people learn to face and regulate their emotions. Interestingly, one 2018 study found that accepting your negative emotions without judgment is a factor in psychological health.

With radical acceptance, when you encounter difficult situations and emotions, you note their presence without trying to suppress them. You accept them, as the name implies. This attitude can address – and reduce – feelings of shame and distress that you may feel, especially when you are not able to simply shut off those feelings and replace them with positivity. That doesn’t mean that you wallow in unpleasant feelings or allow unfortunate circumstances to stunt your responses.

Instead, you note the feelings – accept that they exist – and “hold space” for them within you. You appreciate that your emotions can lead you to new understandings of and reactions to your circumstances. For example, instead of adhering to the unattainable maxim that “Failure is not an option,” you can recognize when you have indeed failed and accept it as a natural part of life. You can then move on to a mindset of growth where you use that failure to inform your future actions. You develop a more accurate picture of the world and can begin implementing real solutions.

Of course, there are situations where radical acceptance is not appropriate. Abusive situations, for one, shouldn’t simply be accepted without being addressed. But neither will positive thinking resolve them. They require action, from seeking help from a trusted individual to leaving the situation to contacting law enforcement or an organization that can help.

But in other circumstances, radical acceptance may be an answer for some. For myself, I’ll just be satisfied if radical acceptance helps drive out toxic positivity. I don’t think it will, but a person can dream.

If I had never found the doctor who diagnosed me with Bipolar, would I have waited and wasted more years of my life in pain and confusion without a diagnosis? Would I have finally swallowed too many depression medications and sleep aides to move or come back to my body or breathe? I can’t know. I would like to think I wouldn’t have let that happen, that I would have continued to search for the answers I so badly craved. However, untreated Bipolar will often make its own choices without considering your feelings or asking you to weigh in.
I know that now, that I never had as much control over my emotions and moods as I thought I did or as society kept telling me I had. I bought into the whole swap-your-pills-for-running-shoes bullshit being shoved on me from what seemed to be every direction at the time.
I wanted so desperately to believe that I could choose happiness, that I could simply motivate myself out of the intensifying sadness and looming panic, that I could water myself without sunlight and still grow.
I thought the sun might show up if I worked harder, if I was aware enough, if I grew stronger, if I practiced all the self-care and self-love I could muster, if I was patient, if I stayed on the treadmill for hours on end, loved god, went to bed early, woke up early, wrote affirmations.
I prayed and I begged and I kept busy, but I flopped like a fish for so many painful years.
The more effort I put in the more I wilted, drooped and watched my petals fall. I turned to literature, read books with titles like “No Excuses,” “The Laws Of Success,” and “You Are A Badass.” I felt inspired, bursts of motivation, but nothing stuck and I continued to blame myself. It’s nice to believe that you can will yourself into wealth, wellness and status.
I “put in the work” for years to better myself. How is it my closest friends could say to me that they thought I wasn’t trying and how could I have continued to believe this?
Even though I felt something abnormal, some monster down below in the depths of me, and I longed to learn its name, I would call it by my own name for years still.
After countless attempts to take my own life, after years of drinking myself sick, swallowing unisom like a multivitamin, all the hospital gowns and the stomach pumping and the pain pills and purging and late nights that bled into morning and the debilitating fear, anxiety and grief which seemed to always be just below the surface, a doctor told me something that I probably already knew, but would change my trajectory— that if something didn’t change I was going to wind up dead. I finally decided to see a psychiatrist.
One diagnosis of depression later, along with a prescription for Klonopin and Zoloft, I was more manic than ever, though I didn’t yet know the word for it. I was having the time of my life while I was simultaneously in so deep I couldn’t keep my head above water long enough to breathe. 
In June of 2013, I found myself stumbling into my kitchen through the dark after a night out drinking with friends. I remember the moonlight spilling in through the front window. I remember how that summer felt, how it consumed me, how I thought moving across the complex to a new unit would bring me back to life, the distress that quickly followed when my moods still plummeted and skyrocketed, the cavernous ache I felt daily. 
I hungered for the pain in my life to subside. I swallowed all my medications and lay there on the floor waiting for it— the feeling of the world coming to an end.
It’s the final thing I remember, before waking up in another hospital bed, too confused to feel anything else, the room like a movie set, not quite real to me yet, searching the floor for black x’s and looking for stage lights tucked away in the rafters. My face was wet with tears I couldn’t remember having cried. They felt unreal, like someone had painted them on. I longed for my parents.
In the days that followed, I felt paranoid and wavered between reality and fantasy. When I talked with my mother I wept. I told her I wouldn’t make it to 30, that I just couldn’t do it. When I said it, I had never been so sure of anything in my entire life the way I felt certain in that moment. I thought I would never be able to escape the sadness that plagued me.
I found Dr. Cai sometime shortly after I was released from the hospital. I was diagnosed with Bipolar 1 and an anxiety disorder.
When I started getting the proper treatment for my mental illness, when I finally knew the name of the monster I’d been avoiding, I started to see color in places where I hadn’t seen color in a very long time. I started to notice flowers growing through the pavement, how odd and beautiful they were, I wondered how they could grow there. I started to feel less sorrow. The sunlight poured in.
Even with a proper diagnosis and treatment it took years to find stability. 
When I was diagnosed with Bipolar I had people tell me they didn’t believe in mental illness and that they thought I was trying to find something to blame my problems on. When I began taking medication, people said I was looking to dodge responsibility and find a “silver-bullet.”
Seeking a diagnosis and starting treatment for my illness was the most responsible thing I have ever done for myself. For years I blamed no one but myself for all my pain. When I was diagnosed, I didn’t seek to blame my illness. But my diagnosis did help me learn to lift the blame off myself and no longer carry the shame others made me feel for getting help.
Starting treatment meant cutting through all the noise and the narratives other people love to tell— that it’s all in my head, that they get sad sometimes, too, that it doesn’t matter what you call it, that it doesn’t need a label and searching for one will only complicate things, that I can’t move from bed because I’m not trying hard enough.
It’s funny that people who have never experienced mental illness have so much to say about it, and have so much fear invested in it— fears which I think stem from our capitalistic ideals, and what we think it means to be lazy, to be unproductive, to be ill, to be unmotivated, to be healthy, to be independent, to be unsuccessful, to be happy, to fail.
Medications have likely saved my life, if not saved me years of unnecessary extremes, addictions and heartache.
I couldn’t have known that learning to love my illness would require so much from me, though I knew it would be a challenge. It was such a massive relief to finally have answers. Maybe I thought simply understanding it or learning its name would be enough for it to stop destroying things. But it’s taken me years to master what I believed then to be the most basic first steps of soothing it. 
Learning to love and accept my mental illness has taught me to love and accept myself and learning to love and accept myself has strengthened my ability to love and accept my mental illness. Choosing to love something I once believed was unloveable, something I once neglected yet yearned to care for, something I tried to run from, has been the most difficult thing I’ve done. It has also been the most beautiful, courageous, exceptional thing I’ve done in my life.
If you’re in the deep end drowning, thinking you’ll never make it out alive, I’m here to tell you a stable life is possible, not if you try hard enough to swim, but if you listen to yourself instead of the people on land yelling at you to save yourself, if you can learn to accept yourself and your madness, if you continue to search for the answers.
Don’t settle for less than what you know you deserve.
You are raw and brilliant and the depth of you is remarkable. You are brave and mightier than you may know now— though someday you’ll realize, and it will take your breath away.
You won’t sink here, in this ocean of grief and despair— you will soar. #MentalHealth #MoodDisorders #BipolarDisorder #Anxiety #Grief #Bipolar1 #BipolarDepression #Addiction #Depression #Trauma #Suicide #Selfharm

I'm sorry if you see this post somewhere else on here. But they really didn't give me a very large window. To offer this book for free 4. And I just, you know. I wanna reach as many hurting people as possible. Because that's, that's why I wrote the book.I wrote Whispers of a Wounded Heart because going through life broken afraid and hating myself just wasn't an option anymore and my life was falling apart around me(still is) in such an incredible fashion that it deserves a fireworks display. The local judge in my California town even dismissed my DUI charges in and unbelievable blessing and told me " you've paid more dearly in the past two years than anything this court could throw at you and you've been cooperative with all we've asked. I trust you won't do this again? OK your case is dismissed. Have a nice day, I do hope things turn around for you". Anyways writing helps me get things out of my head and start trying to just let it go. But My aim for my book was to reach other people like me. Those who suffer from mental illness or come from neglectful, or abusive families, those with severe depression and anxiety, Adjustment and or mood disorders, those who were picked on, taken advantage of, forgotten about. I want all those people suffering out there to know that they are not alone. And that if I can still be here after 5 hospitalizations for suicide attempts struggling with SI and a myriad of disorders, then maybe they can too. Maybe we can all work together just like we do on this site and end the loniless and the fear. Reinstate love and start healing oneanother. Please grab a copy while it's free. It's quite literally the essence of my soul put on paper in detail so vivid you feel like you could touch it. It's Pain and suffering agony and despair it's love and hope, unbridled joy, and Neverending perseverance. It's beautiful resilience of the Human Spirit on open display. I was going to be more honest about the evils I endured at the hand (not just the hand) of my adoptive mother. But last minute I modified many of my works and left a positive dedication just to be the bigger person boy do I regret that. Just in so announcing the release of my book to her am now completely ignore by all of them. Should have expected as much it's the same person who slammed the door in my face Xmas eve as I stood presents in hand surprising her in my dress Blue uniform as a U.S. Marine. If you enjoy my bookand hopefully it makes a difference in your life or the way you see things. Please recommend it to others you may know that might benefit from it. I Thank you very much, especially if you read this far. Thank you especially to whomever started this whole app.

www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLT4H2NN @

I'm sorry if you see this post somewhere else on here. But they really didn't give me a very large window. To offer this book for free 4. And I just, you know. I wanna reach as many hurting people as possible. Because that's, that's why I wrote the book.I wrote Whispers of a Wounded Heart because going through life broken afraid and hating myself just wasn't an option anymore and my life was falling apart around me(still is) in such an incredible fashion that it deserves a fireworks display. The local judge in my California town even dismissed my DUI charges in and unbelievable blessing and told me " you've paid more dearly in the past two years than anything this court could throw at you and you've been cooperative with all we've asked. I trust you won't do this again? OK your case is dismissed. Have a nice day, I do hope things turn around for you". Anyways writing helps me get things out of my head and start trying to just let it go. But My aim for my book was to reach other people like me. Those who suffer from mental illness or come from neglectful, or abusive families, those with severe depression and anxiety, Adjustment and or mood disorders, those who were picked on, taken advantage of, forgotten about. I want all those people suffering out there to know that they are not alone. And that if I can still be here after 5 hospitalizations for suicide attempts struggling with SI and a myriad of disorders, then maybe they can too. Maybe we can all work together just like we do on this site and end the loniless and the fear. Reinstate love and start healing oneanother. Please grab a copy while it's free. It's quite literally the essence of my soul put on paper in detail so vivid you feel like you could touch it. It's Pain and suffering agony and despair it's love and hope, unbridled joy, and Neverending perseverance. It's beautiful resilience of the Human Spirit on open display. I was going to be more honest about the evils I endured at the hand (not just the hand) of my adoptive mother. But last minute I modified many of my works and left a positive dedication just to be the bigger person boy do I regret that. Just in so announcing the release of my book to her am now completely ignore by all of them. Should have expected as much it's the same person who slammed the door in my face Xmas eve as I stood presents in hand surprising her in my dress Blue uniform as a U.S. Marine. If you enjoy my bookand hopefully it makes a difference in your life or the way you see things. Please recommend it to others you may know that might benefit from it. I Thank you very much, especially if you read this far. Thank you especially to whomever started this whole app.

www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLT4H2NN @