Episode #274 - A Messy Reality

While I often talk about how the doctrine and principles of the gospel apply to our lives and our illness, the practical application can be somewhat messy.

Transcript

Welcome to Episode #274 – A Messy Reality.  I am your host Damon Socha.  For those of you who know me through this podcast and elsewhere, you know that I love the doctrine of the church and its power in our lives.  I tend to stick to the doctrine and also the bright side of our illness.  Yes we have problems but most are fixable with time and significant effort.  Today I am going to talk about practical implementation in a way I have not as much.  I am going to talk about the reality of mental illness.  Yes the doctrine works but not always in the way that we expect it to.  Happiness is not what we expected it to be.  Our life has changed and we can’t get it back to the old days where everything was good.  Well the reality was that it wasn’t all good, we just see it that way.  We tend to exaggerate to the extremes when we reminisce about the good ole days.  And that water tasted better from the hose.  And so the practical application can be messy when we expect it to be more linear and complete.  Considering our lives as a baseball game, our desired outcomes may have been a homerun but we had to settle for some singles and a double.  We regret the singles because they were not what we wanted and the double was great as we hit it off the wall but it ended up only a double.  And so we were disappointed by inches again.  And yet we also went four for four in a tight game.  Did we win it with a homerun in the ninth inning?  No we won it because we went four for four and our runs made a difference.

Our mental illness is very much like a baseball game with all its idiosyncrasies and superstitions.  We try out one pitch and it works well for one team but the same pitch gets us rocked out in the second inning.  Mental illness like baseball can mess with your mind.  As a pitcher you can know that you are throwing as good as you ever have and you end up out of the game in the first inning.  And you might only have mediocre stuff with some control troubles and end up almost pitching a no hitter.  Sometimes the circumstances and the outcomes make no linear sense.  Some days you might feel confident and go four for four and other days you are just lucky to be in the game much less be productive.  You will go through slumps of effort where you get little to nothing done and mountains of effort getting done what you should have gotten done but couldn’t.  Mental illness after all like baseball is more of a mental game than a physical one.  Yes you need the tools, the right tools.  The right bat, the right shoes, glove, protection, practice and so forth.  You need the medications, the nutrition, the right music and everything that goes with the management of the illness.  But the game is played in the mind and in the heart.  Any team in the current league can beat any other team at any given time.  I have seen it play out so many times where the Goliath meets his David and nothing seems to go Goliath’s way.  Not that Goliath was any more evil than David just seems like it was David’s day.

You can be the best team in the league and never reach the playoffs.  You can have the best pitching staff, but teams just are hitting.  You can play the numbers game, but it tends to play back once in a while and to make you look a little foolish.  And so, we see that mental illness is more than following some simple doctrine and principles over time.  The path to management is rocky and strewn with good intentions and bad advice.  And that can include professional advice.  Care must be taken on this journey into the unknown as first the journey is unknown and many professed to have walked it who have never fully felt its effects in their lives.  Caution is the first rule of mental illness and that can be difficult to do when you’re suffering.  We tend to reach for anything that works even moderately well.  The second rule is to watch your expectations.  Now we should not dumb down our expectations to the lowest so that we are never disappointed.  But we should not have such high expectations that we will never reach them.  The third rule is time.  Time tends to be the evening factor when it is all said and done and if we cautiously manage our illness, time will be our friend.  The fourth rule of mental illness.  Stress is evil and must be avoided at all costs.  Now I know that this isn’t possible for almost everyone listening.  I wish that it were.  But increasing the stresses in our lives will not provide for healing and peace.  For instance, if family gatherings are too much to handle then you need to adjust your schedule to better meet your needs.  If you don’t your body will do it for you anyway.  You will end up physically sick as one of the ways your body gets what it needs.  Finally, let the Lord prevail in all of this.  That is a hard saying because we are turning over what we want and feel we need to someone who might see salvation in a more lengthy companionship with our illness.  When we turn it over, we turn things over with expectations and long lists of requirements and that just doesn’t work for the Lord.  He needs all of us and the ability to use the illness as he sees fit in our lives.  It takes time to get to the point that you would be willing to let go and even see greater difficulties if the Lord saw fit.

The road to management and ultimately healing is rocky and full of caverns and dark places.  We tend not to travel the same road as everyone else.  Our mental and emotional illness causes such difficulties with emotional reality that our emotional and mental road will look vastly different.  We will not always be able to trust the path that our emotions set.  Because our emotions are partially controlled by the illness we cannot always trust that the path we have set emotionally is right or true.  And when you don’t know it causes all kinds of trouble and indecision.  Rocky roads become paralyzed journeys where deviations and detours are many.  When you struggle to emotionally find the path, you can’t always expect to be on it.  That is the first lesson of mental illness.  You will find yourself off path regularly.  In fact, so regularly you will find yourself off path that you will become frustrated as to how easy it is to get you off the path.  This doesn’t mean the path of righteousness.  This can also mean a career path.  A marriage path.  Really any type of path you choose will be problematic due to your emotional instability.  And so expecting to stay on a path continuously does not work for the illness.  I for instance changed my career a dozen times before I became settled in the work that I do.  I started out college in chemical engineering.  Moved over to secondary education and then graduated with a bachelor's degree in math and science.  I worked in the package industry, maintenance industry, framing, electrical and grocery to name just a few.  This is common for someone who is struggling with mental and emotional illness.  They will struggle to stick to a job.  They need new things regularly to keep them emotionally engaged.  But emotional engagement is almost always short lived.  So individuals with depression and anxiety often have many projects started but few very finished.  Finishing takes some unique emotional skills that are often missing in someone who has suffered for a period of time.  And so if you don’t finish a project that is par for the course.  Finishing even a small project is cause for celebration, even if that celebration is your own.

Your day to day management is going to feel messy.  Because our illness changes regularly, our day to day management of the illness can feel very haphazard and full of holes.  Certainly, we can plan our day and provide for the management of the illness but the illness doesn’t always respond the same way to the stimuli.  And so days can feel as though we are regressing rather than progressing and that is a problem.  When we feel like we are regressing, we tend to abandon the management practices that got us to where we are currently.  And that causes an even further regression.   We can spend far too much time in regression practices removing and reengaging with therapy, medication, music, spiritual practices.  One of the keys to management is to keep working with the same therapies until you are certain they are not providing the benefit you need.  This is especially true with medications as they take time to work effectively.  When we manage by how we feel day to day, we are going to end up in bad places.  You cannot manage and mental illness on a day to day basis at least in the sense of overall management.  Your perspective needs to be weekly and monthly rather than daily.  I feel depression and anxiety differently every day of my life.  Sometimes its bad and other times I hardly feel it.  I am not changing anything, that is just the pattern of mental illness.  Rather than be stationary it swings like a pendulum.  Knowing how your mental illness swings can be of significant benefit as you can attribute certain swings in mood to your illness rather than reality.

The real problem in all of this is that your emotions create your reality.  When your emotions are off so is your reality.  Really nothing could be wrong and you feel like the world is crushing you.  One of the techniques I have used is to assign any emotion that doesn’t make sense to the current set of events to my illness.  I regularly assign many of my depression symptoms to my illness.  And yes it helps my brain understand the why and when it does I am at greater peace.  It doesn't change the emotions necessarily although over time I have learned some capacity to accomplish it.  But it does assign them to irrelevance and that is important to the brain.  The brain can toon out certain emotions if you recognize them and assign the illness to them.  Yes they will still be bothersome but not nearly as so.

The next thing to understand about the realities of mental illness is that your illness will not stay the same.  It is going to change over time.  Often bipolar in younger years turns to depression in older years.  Anxiety and come and go with various symptoms.  Your illness can disappear for a time and then reappear years later.  Meaning as predictable as your illness is, the same can be said about its unpredictable behavior.  This will make management difficult as you will need to make changes in medications, therapies, music, spiritual practices and so forth.  When you no longer feel as though anything is working then it is time to make a subtle change.  Large changes in therapies of all types is not recommended as large changes often cause large emotions.  When we do make changes they should be smaller and more defined.  Small changes can often lead to much larger results than expected so it is advisable that individuals who suffer limit the number of large changes in their lives.  Large changes can really be anything that is close to trauma or seriously unsettling to the soul.  This will cause a disruption in the emotional control of the illness but it tends to excite the illness to greater highs or lows.  So while one might obtain temporary relief from mental illness by a large disruption in life, that disruption may cause a serious increase in symptoms and significant trouble for a longer period of time.  However, one of the symptoms of mental illness is this consistent desire for large disruptions such as a move, a new love, a new color of house, new hair cut, clothing and so forth.  It is an attempt to break the consistency of the emotional patterns which are causing suffering.  However, too large of a change will cause significant damage to the emotional soul and take significant time from which to recover.

Finally, in all the mess and turmoil that surrounds the illness, take time to discover it.  Take time to understand it.  Take time to let it teach you the lessons it was meant to teach.  So often we resist it so much that we forget that it is one of the Lord’s tools that teaches valuable lessons wrapped in the bitter irony of mortality and a veil that doesn’t allow us to see the end goal.  The problem with the method is not the method but that we cannot see the changes the method is making and then see the value they will create.  Given the good you could do without your illness, I suspect that the illness is far more important that what you could have done for the Lord.  Like the widow who cast in her mites, the Lord didn’t change her circumstances, he just accepted the offering she could give.  That is who we are and what we are learning.  Is it hard?  Yes.  Does it stretch us to the limit? Yes and that is the point.  There is no point in a trial that doesn’t stretch a person spiritually.  Do we wish for a different trial?  Probably all the time, but we tend to pick trials that would be much easier for us and we would learn far less.  We must get ourselves into the learning zone and that is where life gets uncomfortable and troublesome.  When we finally say that I can’t do this alone is when we find the Savior waiting.  And ultimately that is the real point of all this trouble.  The Savior is waiting for us. He is waiting for you.  Until next week do you part so that the Lord can do his.