Mental Health: Share Your Experiences

quite honestly it hasnt been great but my latest ex therapist was really cool :) he made me feel safe talking to him about some stuff and honestly i really wish i couldve stayed with him

Thank you for this prompt @SoulfullyAButterfly

I feel like it's better to take some tiny actions than rewinding our thoughts and reevaluating our emotions again and again. I find it both equally important to give time to my thoughts and to focus on other important activities.

@SoulfullyAButterfly

I feel like I need to get this out there and since it’s been a little while and I’ve learned, I think it may be helpful for someone else going through the same thing!

Tw: Toxic friendship

Here I go:

I had this friend. For privacy reasons, we’ll call her H. H and I had been friends since Kindergarten. I never really had any friends, she was basically my first friend. And we were friends until about 2nd grade and we had a fight for a year and became friends again until 5th grade. I always tried to make new friends. I never tried to abandon H or anything like that, I just had other friends too. I always noticed around these friends though that H would get jealous, but if H had other friends I wouldn’t get jealous. She only wanted me to be friends with her friends and she convinced me that I had social anxiety. But it all changed when in 4th grade I met another friend S. S was so sweet and funny and cool, we instantly became friends. We even made up our own nicknames for each other. We invited H to be in our group to and surprisingly she said sure. S and I were always together because and lunch H would read and not talk to us. Fast forward a couple months and H starts to distance herself from us for some reason and she starts spreading rumors about S and my other friend R. But at this point I felt weird being around H and S was really sweet to me and H had never really been that way to me, so I stuck with S. I start getting really popular in my class because distancing myself from H has made me way more confident and comfortable socially and I finally show my real colors. I felt so happy for once but one day I went home and my mom told me that we needed to talk. She told me that H’s mom had texted her and told her that S was a bad influence one me because she was telling me lies and doing bad things to get me to be with her and not H. I was really confused and my mom told me that S sounded bad and I needed to apologize to H and I needed to stop being friends with S. S meant so much to me, she had gotten me out of my shell. But I felt like I was forced to be friends with H. I hung out with S secretly until summer when S went to a different middle school than me. S’s mom asked if we could hang out during the summer but my mom rejected her and made me feel bad when I told her that I liked S.

Ever since then I felt like I had to constantly be friends with H until this year. I always just tagged along H. I couldn’t be friends with anyone H didn’t like. But recently H kind of just abandoned me so she can sit in the band hall to practice, so now I have a new friend group again (they’re the funniest people ever I love them so much) but H always tells me things to tear down my self esteem. There’s a lot of other things but this week she was trying to get me a birthday gift and asked me what my interests are and when I told her, she said “The things you like are really cringy” and that was when it finally clicked: H is a toxic friend.

I’m so sorry this was so long. I think I’m going to email S tomorrow and tell her that I’m sorry. I hope this can help someone realize if they’re in a toxic situation and if it can’t, well I’m just glad it’s finally out of my system. Also it’s 1 am so sorry if I rambled a little in this lol.

Much love,

Yin <3

@SoulfullyAButterfly

Hopefully my account isn't too much or triggering to anyone.

So, I haven't been officially diagnosed, but the symptoms of borderline personality disorder are very consistent with my feelings and past behaviors.

The most common thing is that I constantly feel like everyone probably hates me. When I don't hear from my friends for a while I definitely start feeling that way, and it's hard to even think about them. And I feel totally crippled from reaching out myself a lot of the time. Also, when people are talking, I always worry that they're talking behind my back.

Another big thing is the self harm/destruction. I used to have a major self-harm problem, namely beating myself. I never got into cutting, but I used to beat myself to the point that I felt like I wasn't even in my body. It started at age 14. My worst instance was when my girlfriend/best friend of years told me that "if I had ever loved her I would get out of her life", which was over me not giving her space after a major fight. I couldn't make it to my car, fell to my knees on the sidewalk, and bashed my head into the ground until I couldn't stop laughing. Also, one time I had a really bad night delivering pizzas, when I'd recently gotten fired from a much better job. Some old lady I delivered to started in on me for something wrong probably outside of my control, didn't tip, and started going off on me about basically failing at life, when she didn't even know me... So I started beating myself in front of her, telling her off for the kind of disgusting person she was... I terrified her. My manager heard about it, and I expected to get fired again, but she was instead accepting and worried about me... From then on at that job, I went the extra mile for her, because most people wouldn't understand.

There have been a multitude of other symptoms I've had (mostly) in the past that I'm not going to focus on right now, such as dramatic behavior, suicidal behavior, drinking binges, being promiscuous.

As it is, before anyone here gets too worried, I haven't had any suicidal tendencies in a couple of years, and have only self-harmed twice, mildly, in the past year. The main thing that still gets me is constantly worrying about people I care about thinking ill of me.

So, how did I get mostly better? Uh, I don't know honestly. I finally got the hang of it after intermittently feeling out of control for most of my life, though I know I'm not free of it. Again, I've never been diagnosed, which is surprising considering I've been to about 10 counselors and been hospitalized twice. It's not good to self-diagnose, so maybe don't follow my example, but I'm just a psych nerd and it's my closest guess.

My biggest mistake was mostly keeping to myself, even in therapy, about what was bothering me. Yes, it can get better, but it helps a lot if it doesn't have to be done alone.

In my mid-30s now, I was first diagnosed with depression in elementary school. At that time, I was too young to be prescribed with medication so my doctor had me see a Psychologist. Unfortunately, the first Psychologist I saw made my situation worse, not only did he not try to understand the cause of my depression, he had made me feel everything was my fault. Long story short, I didn't really have a breakthrough with my depression until in my early 20s. After being hospitalized for 10 days, I went through a Psychodynamic Group Therapy the Hospital offered as my recovery. It lasted for 3-6 months (forgot how long it was already). In a group of about 10 people, plus one Psychiatrist and two assistants, we helped each other dig deep into our past. To find the origin of our mental health problems. During this time, I came to realize many things and found out my experiences and insights helped others understand/see things that they, themselves did not realize. Then, a few years later, I met a female Psychologist where I had a second breakthrough. From my early childhood, I had experienced a few traumatic events, which let to endless nightmares. I even kept journals of these nightmares (as I remember them in detail). Based on these nightmares, this Psychologist had linked them to the experiences I had in life, to those traumas in my childhood. It was then, when I finally understood what those nightmares meant, and why it had haunted me for so long. Fast forward to the present time, I only get nightmares maybe twice a month, had been medication-free for the last 7 years and I had been continuously finding ways to cope with triggers and my depression.

I think that once we are diagnosed with something like depression, it is a mental health illness that will be with us for life. We need learn to live with it and incorporate it into our lives. To live with depression, we can always use our experiences to help others who are struggling with similar difficulties.

So, I would like to thank the creators of this platform, 7Cups, that allowed me to find my own support, feel safe, understood, and fulfilled a partial dream (of helping others) at the same time!

Sorry for the long post, I tend to lose track of what I talk about and rant a bit. I get carried away when it comes to written text~

@SoulfullyAButterfly

It's honestly not great at the moment. They're assessing me for psychotic disorders, so yeah. My mental health experience is interesting. I had my first psychotic episode as a teenager. Back then, I believed:

• Vampires are following me (I liked that)
• The government tries to control our thoughts by putting fluoride in the water
• I'm the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler
• I can read minds and predict the future
• There's a New World Order that tries to oppress all of us, except for a tiny elite
• I'm part of an elite group who knows stuff that others don't know
• The radio and TV are just tools of mass control
• The Rothschilds and the Rockefellers are behind the world's misery
• Hospitals are evil places that harm people
  

@SoulfullyAButterfly It's been 2.5 years since I got diagnosed with Type 1 Bipolar Disorder. It all started with a mild depression following a bad breakup. I loved him so much that I started losing pieces of me and with so much ease he ended our 3 year long relationship. I was devastated. Begged, pleaded and what not. Now when I look back, I realise how miserable I was then. But nothing could melt his heart. I had major depressive episodes in the past 2.5 years and constantly deal with anxiety. The fact that I couldn't really move on makes it worse. I have been actively trying to mend the broken relationship only to realise that he doesn't even respect me. The amount of trauma is so much that I wake up breaking down every morning. To make things worse, I had my first manic episode that too on my bestfriend's brother's wedding day and I did horrible things. My bestfriend is no longer in my life and I miss him. That was the first time I felt helpless in my life and my dad had to see me turn psychotic. The only people I am grateful to is my parents for supporting me throughout. Without them, I don't think I would have survived lot of things. I am learning to take control of my emotions and my mood. I want to heal taking all the time I need. I am on that journey. I thank the supreme consciousness (God) for giving me the strength to pick up everytime I fall. I am extremely happy to having joined 7 Cups.

Lots of Love.