So this blog has been a big quiet for a while and I apologise for that.Life has a way sometimes of just throwing challenges at you and there were just too many to handle and put into words.
My partner are I travel and had decided to settle in Indonesia for a couple of years (We have a rescue dog here and also just fell in love with the place and the people) We left to go to Cambodia and then onto Laos to pick up our visas for Indonesia - these have to be picked up outside of the country. We had a great time in Cambodia and spent a lot of time just taking in what was going on around us. We also got the chance to spend time with friends who we haven't seen for a while. Then we moved onto Laos. This was when Covid really hit hard. We had a flight booked to return to Indonesia and the borders of Laos were closed 2 days before our flight. We then learned that immigration was closed and our visas would take longer than originally planned. We then learned that if you want to rent a house it is virtually impossible to do so without putting down a big deposit and signing for a minimum of a year. After that we ran out of our meds and life just slowly started slipping away from us. We had to sort out renting a room in a hotel until inter province travel was allowed. All the shops were shut and we found it increasingly difficult to find fresh food. When we were allowed to move around again we moved to the Capital as we had another flight booked. This flight was then cancelled and we had to find somewhere to rent in the city. For various reasons the prices in the Capital are ridiculous. We were in what was essentially 2 small rooms and paying over $350 a month excluding bills. We managed to get medication which was a huge plus but were just so defeated by the situation. showers were rarely happening and we could only get access to the same few vegetables all the time. There is very little access to easy transport so we couldn't really get around which doesn't help much with people who are feeling depressed. We spent months making the same trek to the visa office to apply and then pay for another months stay in a country that we couldn't leave. Laos did not have a visa waiver program so we still had to pay to be there even though we couldn't actually leave. Because we were in such close quarters I began working in the early hours of the morning and then napping into the afternoon so we could be both have some alone time. We started working with an animal sanctuary and fostering animals. We fostered 2 cats from the sanctuary who both found their forever homes. We also rescued a dog and another kitten. The kitten we called 美丽 (beautiful in Chinese). The dog, who we called Minnie, helped us more than she will ever know. She was an incredibly skinny 2 year old who roamed the streets around where we were living. We got the vets out and had to give her treatments for infections and vaccines as well as getting her spayed. I would never consider visiting Laos ever again apart from to see her. The only way we could make it out of Laos was to get on a charter flight which had to get approval from the government and cost us about 5 times what it would have usually. The weekend before the flight we had to get PCR tests done and fill in a load of paperwork to a. be allowed to leave the country and b. enter Malaysia's airport and c. Enter Indonesia. We ended up with plastic wallets full of different documents that we needed. When we made it back to Indonesia we were staying in a studio apartment. We started to foster again a few days after we got there and the kitten that we had sadly passed away. After that we moved our of the studio apartment and are now renting a house. Our visas are finished and we are allowed to live here legally, We are both in a better place but have needed time to work through this experience as it was a lot. Next week it'll hopefully be back to normal blogs. Thank you for your patience. You are OK. You are not alone. You are enough.
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So one of the things that happens when you have an illogical brain is that you only hear or acknowledge the negative. This is kind of detrimental because it means you fail to focus on the positive. Obviously this doesn't really do any good for your mental state. This doesn't mean that you only hear the bad parts and brush them off. There is a whole thought process that follows hearing the negative. First you have ignored the positive. I used to give feedback to people and use a technique called the 'shit sandwich'. This is where you tell someone 2 good things and in the middle you say one bad thing. This way it softens the blow and can also help people to focus on the positive of what they are doing. (This also helped me because I was telling people more nice things than bad things so they could feel better) So when you are given feedback or a passing comment or having a conversation or being graded (or pretty much in any situation) there will inevitably be things that you are better at and things that you are worse at. It's part of being human. But your illogical brain does not compute that. It literally seizes on the negative and runs away with it. Really runs away it. Likes miles away from anything that could possibly be meant by it. So when you hear a negative comment your mind starts whirring. You begin by thinking what you could have done better so you wouldn't have been given that comment. You then have the delight of going on a journey through every possible thing that could have led up to it and how you could have done better before that so you wouldn't have been given that comment. You then make a whole bunch of resolutions on how you will be better. It's like you have to immediately change it so no one will ever think that way again. This uses a massive amount of mental energy and can be completely consuming. I used to get to the point at work where I would do something slightly wrong on purpose so I could control the negative comments. I would literally plan what would be the bad part of my day so I would be able to handle one negative comment. This is not normal brain behaviour. This is illogical brain behaviour. Although it did make others feel happy so then it made me feel better and also worse. Another thing that I see as a plus but is also time consuming and strange to others is that I give emotions to inanimate objects. Literally every thing you can think of. If I am mopping a floor I have to mop all of it or that part I have missed will be sad. Although not strictly part of paying attention only to the negative, it does tie in in my mind, because now you are finding ways to still feel negative about something. oSo how do you combat this? How do you retrain your brain to think more of the good and less of the bad?
The first answer that always goes with this kind of stuff is: with a lot of hard work. None of this stuff is ever easy but it's worth it. And that is something you have to keep telling yourself. It's very easy to look online and find all of these ways to make your mind look only for the positive. I looked to find other ways that I haven't been using to see if any of them would help. Part of the problem I saw with a lot of these sites (and I may just be far too cynical) is that they seem more for the instagram crowd rather than the illogical brain crowd. As mush as I would like every day to be picture perfect and my mind to be continually on an even keel as well as having time and motivation to work out, journal, be mindful, create an affirmation every day, make a list of things I'm grateful for every day and all the rest, I simply don't. I lack motivation a lot of the time as anyone with a depressive illness would know all about. I also have a way of getting completely lost in something and doing it for long periods of time every day. As someone who was unable to be in control of a lot of her environment, I tend now to go a bit too far when it comes to picking something up.. Easy example is thinking I had to work out twice a day (once in the morning when I first woke up with a cup of tea and then after I had worked for a bit) One of the worst things about this is seeing this is it can help to compound your negative feelings, so as much as there can be useful content in these articles and blog posts it can sometimes be difficult to find something that appeals to you. One of the things I've found that works is to focus on one thing. Literally one thing. Recognize that one thing and see how you can get your mind to make it positive. If we use the example of you having some stuff left on your desk at the end of the day and someone making a comment about it- immediately your mind has gone negative. However a way to flip this is to think that you will look busier than everyone else the next day because you will already be working when you get into work. Challenge yourself to flip just one of those negative thoughts and find a funny or a positive instead. Over time it will become easier for you to flip the thought and then you can move onto one or two other thoughts. Another thing that I have found reasonably helpful is to control how and what people are going to give you negative comments for. Bear with me because I know this sounds weird. But if you know an area that someone would critique you on and you have the ability to perhaps not do quite such a good job in that area (It's alright because that area would be happy that it was helping you) then you can prepare yourself for the comment. It sounds like a strange idea but it allows you to get more used to the idea of people giving comments. Seriously it used to be the case that I couldn't have any form of negative comment from anyone without crying. And not even just a little cry. A full on sob. Which is highly embarrassing when you are trying to pretend that everything is perfect, that you are a fully functioning adult and whilst wearing a pencil skirt (They can be hard to run in especially when you have a hole in your tights you've been hiding all day). The important thing to remember is that you are not going to do this overnight, I've been trying actively trying to do this for just over a year and I still cry. Luckily I don't have to wear the pencil skirts any more so it is a bit easier to run away. A lot of what happens when you recover from abusive situations (again my diagnosis came after being in a long term abusive situations but some I have had since my teenage years that I just didn't know about) is you have to test boundaries. You've essentially been locked in a box for so long that everything becomes a test. And to be fair one of the ways to get through this is to test everything, So why not make it something you can prepare yourself for? Third way that seems to be quite good and has worked for me on occasion is to write down these thoughts and all the tangents they go on. let your mind just go crazy and get it all down on paper. Or draw it. Or make a flow chart. Or a list. Whatever it takes to get it all out where you can see them. Once you feel that you are able to look at where your mind has gone. See which parts of the thoughts were powered by the illogical brain and which thoughts were negative. It also helps if you take note of the comment (S) that set off the train of thought. Go through and see which could actually happen and which are just the power of free rein on your illogical minds part. Seems like a lot of work but over time you will be able to see patterns that emerge. And then you can start to look out for these patterns. Once you know what you are looking for, you can start looking out for it when it is happening in real time. Once you start letting both parts of your brain realise that you are worthy of praise and you should be proud of things that you do and that you are, you make huge strides in your self worth. And you should definitely love yourself. Because you are worthy of love. But it needs to come from you first. You are enough. You are not alone. You are ok. So recently I was having a conversation with my Mother and she started talking about something called catastrophizing. It caught my attention because it sounded like something I am very aware that I may do, Basically it boils down to pretty much what it says on the tin. It's a belief you have that comes from your illogical brain that tells you that a situation is way worse than it actually is. Delightfully you can do this in one of two ways: you can be in a current situation and see it as a catastrophe or you can imagine a situation in the future that could turn into a catastrophe (because why not cover all bases?) This can be literally anything. Imagine you are at work and someone makes a comment about how something wasn't quite finished. Your mind isn't nice to you telling you that it's fine because you know you will finish it today. Instead it goes on to create all these negative scenarios. For example: because you didn't finish that work you are going to lose your job. No one else will want to employ you because you lost your last job. You clearly don't have good enough skills or a high enough work ethic. You are going to have to move out of where you live because you won't be able to pay rent so you'll probably end up homeless and homeless people can't get work. People won't want to know you because you are just a drain on society and you'll just end up dying in a ditch alone. The other delightful problem with this is that it doesn't just come from someone else. If you get too into your head then your illogical brain can just take the reins and come up with all kinds of catastrophes that will happen in the next 2 minutes and in the next 5 years. Along with all of the outcomes. Obviously this isn't going to happen. This is a story that your mind has made up. The other point I'd like to make here that as someone who has gone through abuse my mind has been conditioned (in a way) to always think I've done wrong and I have to make it right. So automatically this kind of scenario comes up in your mind. Followed immediately by ways in which you can correct them. And later by ways in which you can ensure they don't happen again. It's a lot to go through mentally. When you act in a way that you see the future events all happening and you believe it will go wrong, in a way like you don't deserve it to right, so you will act in ways that make the negative future you have in your head happen. This also means things like projecting the behaviour of another onto someone who has not or will not act that way. This I know I have done. It's not a behaviour that I am proud and it's something that I am trying to change, IT's tough. Really tough. You have to combat a way of thinking that you know and that you feel safe in even if you know that it is not helping you. It's so hard to do. And you have to do it so much. Especially when it just keeps coming at you. But that's one of the good parts of this: you get to become a better you. Here's the thing though. Once you get to the stage where you are aware that this is what you are doing you then have to think of ways in which you can stop doing this. It's somewhere that you feel safe, if you have prepared your mind by thinking of how everything can and will go wrong then you know what is coming. Also because you believe you don't deserve anything good then you are making life true to what you believe.
So there are things you can do to help with putting a limit on how much you have these thoughts or even just being aware that you are having these thoughts. These are things that I have found that seem to help a bit (obviously I slip every once in a while but at least I'm trying which is the main point right?) One of the things I've read that you can try to do to help is try to recognise when you are having these thoughts that are coming from you delightful illogical brain. One thing that I found reasonably useful is to write down the thoughts when you have them. I love a good highlighter so I'd pick a colour and then highlight the thoughts that I saw were coming from my illogical brain. Obviously it's difficult to do and it does take a bit of practice. But it does make it something colourful which is a plus (you've got to find them wherever you can!) As strange as it sounds sometimes we hang onto these thoughts and we will revisit them at later dates and obviously we need to work through them at our own place. When you feel strong enough or that you have worked through the thoughts a good amount then you can release the thoughts to the universe. Basically this can be something as simple as screwing up the paper and throwing it in the bin, You can also rip it up or burn it. (I am a fan of burning just because I've been cooking in a wood fire oven and I like the thought that my negativity is being used to create something delicious.) The above is a step that I found difficult but actually really challenging. The main challenge I found was separating the thoughts in my head. Seeing them on paper made it a little easier but these thoughts have helped me and kept me safe in certain situations. However it has created issues for me in other areas, which I had chosen to ignore (like a true adult) Part of what really hampered me was the fact that I spent so much of my life in a severely anxious and depressive state but with no idea that It was actually not the norm to be thinking the way that I was. Therefore it became my normal and worked for me. Well, it didn't actually work for me but it did. I know I've said this in a few blog posts but making sure that you are taking care of yourself is important. Sleep is one of the best things in the whole entire world and so very very elusive that it is just incredible. The week of writing this post I have had a period where I slept a grand total of 1.5 hours in a 40 hour period. Before that I had nights of 2-3 hours. And it shows. I am in less control on my illogical brain and it's hampering me and those around me. So take the time, really just like 5 minutes a day to just be aware of you. Listen to a song you love, read part of a book, whatever it takes. You are allowed to. Once you recognise the thoughts that are coming from the illogical brain you can start to try and play this fun game. For every negative thought that you have, you then think of a positive thought to go with it. For this to work you first have to register the thought is coming from your illogical brain, accept that it might not be so realistic and then come up with a positive thought. It seems like a lot of work and to begin with it is but once you get into the hang of it, it does become a lot easier. Using the example earlier (some notices that some work wasn't finished the day before) Negative thought: I'm going to get fired. Positive thought: I know that the work I have done has been done to the best of my ability. Another example but this time of your illogical mind just battling you would be something like Nobody wants me to be around them because no one has messaged me. Positive thought: It gives me time to read that book I've been trying to or It's actually a blessing in disguise because I am really tired and listening to my body so now I have the chance to sleep. One thing that I am interested in trying to do is positive affirmations. Obviously it's taking me some time to choose the correct affirmation because you have to believe it and I'm still doing a lot of work on building up my self worth. But it would be helpful to have something to say that I genuinely believe to be able to stop my illogical brain going crazy. Any suggestions I'd be glad to hear them. Although it seems like an insurmountable amount of work, if you take it just one day and one illogical thought at a time you can do some good. Really, you can do it. You are enough. You are not alone. You are ok. |
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