Personal Mental Health Recovery

A lesson in boundary setting: Balancing vulnerability, transparency and dysregulation

First of all: I have come to the realization that it is unrealistic for me to expect me to post every single day on here publicly. Because on my bad days – my really bad days – posting publicly on here feels,

too vulnerable. And when you are already dysregulated you certainly do not need to make yourself feel even more unsafe. That makes things only worse. The idea of going outside your comfort zone certainly does not hold true from a certain degree of dysregulation. Basically in order to go outside your comfort zone, you have to be inside the comfort zone to begin with. Which you certainly aren’t when you are dysregulated.
secondly I think that the unfiltered helpless and hopeless ramblings of my darkness, would give the reader no real value (other than morbid entertainment maybe, which I personally am certainly not interested in providing). I even fear that it might drag others down out some point. Yes I still believe that being transparent is of value and I will continue posting some unfiltered thoughts on here, but I will post them when they are not too fresh anymore and with an addendum containing reflections, to provide context and maybe an inspiration on how to deal with and process these dysregulated states.

My solution for now is to still try to post on here daily, but to chose to make the posts on the really dark days private. Which allows me to still publish them in a edited format at a later day, and serves me privately to give continuity and transparency. It is not that I am completely lost from the world when times are dark, but that in those days we need protection, we need kindness etc. And in those moments the far-reaching, open and wide realms and abysses of the world wide web are not what gives us the needed protection.

Basically a good lesson in boundary setting.

I want to encourage my readers, to become more aware, if they tend to ignore their own boundaries in moments of dysregulation and maybe are too vulnerable with themselves towards others. Whether they maybe stand in the way of their own re-regulation because they are feeling too exposed to others.

On the other hand I do want encourage readers as well, to not put up walls instead of boundaries. Meaning: To not be open at all to others at any point in time, means to put up walls. That is the crucial difference between walls and boundaries. Walls are there no matter what – they do not let anything through at any time. Boundaries – like walls – serve to protect us, but they include a dynamic awareness of when and how much protection is necessary.

Boundaries are individual. Just because I feel safe expressing certain things to certain people, does not mean that another person should feel safe in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances. We all need to discover ourselves what we are comfortable with and when our limits are reached. It is important. to exactly test and get to know our personal border area where comfort turns into discomfort, where safe turns into danger.

Healthy boundary setting takes into account the dynamic nature of our comfort zones, and also is able to regulate the degree, the extent of a boundary. By the latter I mean that for example, just because at a certain point I feel not fully safe anymore posting something on here publicly, does not mean I have to shut the whole blog down – which would be the most radical form of putting up a wall. But even further than wall or no wall.

I have options in how my boundary can looke like: Depending on the degree of how unsafe I feel, I have options in how much protection I need. Sometimes it might be sufficient to edit a post a little just after writing it and then post it. Sometimes I might chose to disable comments. Sometimes I might chose to post at a later time. Sometimes I might chose not to post about this topic for now. Sometimes I might chose to take a break from posting. And of course if for some reason no boundary option would work to make me feel safe, a wall is also an option. It is not about never putting up a wal, but about having the option not to put up walls when it is not necessary.

I am listing these things on here, to really raise the awareness how much boundary setting is about awareness of our need for protection and about awareness of our capabilities to deal with danger. If I am not aware of my need for protection I might likely not set boundaries at all, and expose myself to danger and thereby harm my mental wellbeing. On the other hand if I have no awareness at all of my abilities to mitigate certain levels of danger (emotionally and through action), then I will put up a wall whenever I sense the slightest danger coming my way.

People who have healthy boundary setting abilities, have those two aspects securely installed in themselves, because when they grew up their natural desire to protect themselves was respected by their parents, while they also experienced that their parents trusted in and nurtured their age-appropriate abilities to protect themselves.

This sucks – a breaking heart for no good reason

Not well, not well, not well at all. Good sleep though at least. But feeling intense heartbreak for the whole day now (no trigger). How do you explain to someone else that your heart is breaking without a reason? Tried everything I know to re-regulate. No success. Just waiting for the day to end and hoping that sleep will bring relief at least (it usually does)

[EDIT:] This post is from a day, where I felt an intense sensation of heartbreak throughout the whole day. Despite struggling to do so, I did start my daily practice, but nothing helped. The heartbreak was there unmoving, unrelenting. Which as such was very hard for me, because I really had hoped that my daily routine would be able to help re-regulating all kinds of dysregulative states I have. But apparently this heartbreak was completely resistent. I am currently reflecting on possible methods that might help re-regulate on such days as well. As usual this is a work in progress.

Adapting my daily routine: Lack of Sleep but emotionally ok

So many smart thoughts in my head and too little energy to put them into any coherent order to post. So I am not even going to try. Again, I am struggling with an extreme lack of sleep. But the good thing today is, that the effect is mainly physical only. I feel as if I have ingested lead, but emotionally I feel still quite positive. Which is kind of rare, since usually mind and body do influence each other quite a lot of course. I have also been quite active again so far. Despite a two hour gap earlier, where I just couldnt move from exhaustion. Luckily most of the heavy physical stuff is out of the way: 30 minutes physical exercise, a walk through the forest, cleaning my apartment. That is all done. Also, besides this blog, I am not really expected to be smart anymore today. The only “challenging” task left is going shopping and driving the car. I will try to drink quite some water before I leave in one hour. Maybe also do the shaking exercise by Ann Marie Chiasonn. Unfortunately it is too late in the day to drink green tea. And I already had a cup. More than one cup is dangerous for me, as this usually ends up in me having a panic attack. Maybe I will have a little rest also before I leave.

[EDIT] This post is a good example of how I am navigating/adapting my daily practice on days where I am challenged to some degree, but am not at the red stage of dysregulation yet. On those days I find the practices of Morning Pages/Intentional writing and Free Speaking particularly helpful as they allow for an honest check-in with myself, and protect me from trying to live up to a too rigid schedule for the day (and then failing).

My daily Routine helps me Re-regulate

So the saga continuous. I again did not sleep well, and of course again this made me wake up, feeling very dysregulated. But – alas – despite that, I have managed so far, to be quite active. Despite the physical exhaustion and a sense of feeling ill and feeling emotionally drained. As promised in yesterday’s post, I want to explain a little bit, what I believe the factors are that let me be active – keep moving and not freeze up – despite the initial state of dysregulation.

In fact I have taken quite some inspiration here from Crappy Childhood Fairies Youtube Channel, where she talks about CPTSD and treatment options. The main point she makes is that it is all about learning to re-regulate. She described her daily practice and also talks about different treatment options that she says have been found to be efficient in the treatment of CPTSD.

For several years I have been constantly in the process of re-adjusting my daily routine, to find a doable balance, that allows me to feel alive, secure, productive and loved. Let’s call them the four pillars of mental wellbeing. Achieving those pillars at the same time, is the ultimate challenge for anyone having CPTSD. Exactly those four feeling states are what was so heavily under attack during your childhood. A functioning healthy adult naturally has these four pillars in balance and it does not need any special effort for them to achieve that. Not so much with sufferers of CPTSD. When dysregulation has a constant hold over your life, even nurturing one of the pillars is a challenge already.

But I think with Anna Runkle’s (the creator of Crappy Childhood Fairy) new inspiration and the insights shared by experts like Bessel van der Kolk and others, my daily routine has taken a shape which seems to be sustainable in the dark, dysregulated days even. And not only that, it also seems possible now to at least gradually shift those days towards the light (aka re-regulate).

So let me give you the current state of my routine:

I wake up very early, still at night time, between 2 and 4 am. Which gives me a good sense of freshness and competence when starting into my day. When other people wake up only, I am already in the peak of my activity.

The first thing I do is write down on a handwritten note app the plan for the day, which is basically a long to-do list, categorized into a few groups for structure. And underneath I write the first 5 or 6 priorities I have, which are those tasks I will do first. Whenever I have finished all the tasks on my priority list, I add 5 new priorities. This step by step planning, allows me to check in throughout the day with my physical and emotional state and adjust my plans accordingly.

Usually in the beginning I type 15 minutes in Morning Pages style. Then I do 20 minutes of Transcendental Meditation (which I will do again at least once more during the day).

I do light cardio physical exercise for 30 minutes. Which lets me break a little sweat, but not too bad, so that I can easily continue with my activities after a 5 minute break.

After that I write again for 15 minutes, pretty similar to morning pages, but this time with a guiding question of: “What’s on my mind, what is bothering me?” Let’s call it intentional writing. Which helps me feel prepared as well forces me to face the things I might be avoiding even thinking about.

After that it is 30 minutes of tidying and cleaning my apartment, and then off into the bathroom for my daily hygiene routine. These two points do not sound that exciting, but I put them very high on my priority list since they indeed ARE crucial in grounding my day and feeling ready and confident. On those days where it is particularly hard to get myself started with them I work with some anti-procrastination trick similar to the 5 minute rule.

Then it is usually light outside and I go for a walk in nature. I try to take a short video every time I am outside, which I post on my Youtube Channel, trying to document the positive and alive feelings associated with being outside in nature.

I also write on here of course.

And then I also have a body-work exercise for grounding, which focusses on opening the hips and legs, which in my case are chronically supertense and numb even. It’s a combination of a few exercises, and I must say they have proven incredibly helpful with calming anxious states of mind as well as having gotten rid of a migraine.

In addition to the Morning Pages and Intentional Writing, I also allow myself to brainstorm a bit on audio – which I refer to as Free Speaking. Where I just speak about anything that comes to mind. I do these techniques intentionally both writing and speaking, since they seem to access different energy states. Throughout the day I might have a look or a listen, when I feel a need for some clarity and introspection. At the end of the week, I go through those tapes and texts and reflect on the different thoughts and ideas.

So this is a brief overview, which I hope helps give a little impression of my daily routine. I think two aspects here are really crucial:

One are all the practices that help and allow me to keep in touch with my inner cognitive and emotional world, and thereby allows it to stay in movement. There is very little room for avoiding and suppressing thoughts and feelings – very little room for things to freeze up. Which promotes a sense of activatedness, of in-touchness, of aliveness. Of wanting to rather deal with things, than not.

The other crucial aspect I believe is all the physical movement I do. Similarly to the other aspect, my body is not allowed to tense up and go numb. I stay more in my body, I dissociate less. At least not to the degree it usually does. I keep activating the energy flow, which I believe very much supports the processing of emotions and thereby the re-regulation of the brain.

Managing despite a really bad dysregulation from lack of sleep

I’ll keep it brief. I have not slept well at all. And if I don’t sleep well, I am not just simply exhausted. But I feel physically ill and the likelihood of struggling with emotional pain attacks is also increased (so far 2 today). I am proud that despite being in such a bad state, I still managed to do some things, be active. Of course not as much and as well as I could on a good day, but I would say at about 50%, which is honestly pretty amazing, considering how unwell I am physically and emotionally right now.

Right now it feels like someone is clawing at my chest from the inside and I struggle breathing. So obviously typing is really hard, therefore I leave it at that. In CPTSD terms you would say: Heavily, heavily dysregulated!

[EDIT]: I really want to stress how amazing it is that I managed on the day of this posting to achieve a certain level of activity. In such moments the impulse to just let go and and let myself go (in a way) is very strong. The need for comfort, warmth and carefreeness is super high. The inability to think creatively makes it impossible to just follow through with the normal plan for the day. But luckily I was able to realize that I could still be active, if I just go at a slower pace. Things need to be adjusted and from shifting state to shifting state the plan for the day needs to be adjusted.

Psychiatric Diagnosis, the ICD-10

I want to collect a bit my thoughts on the Diagnostic System of Psychiatry, the ICD-10:

I think it does much more harm than it serves people. It implies an idea that these disorder categories – the diagnosis – people are put in, are clear-cut and distinct from each other. Yes, the system allows for comorbidity, but it still creates this idea – for example: “Ok this person has a social anxiety disorder, and then there is depression with such and such degree of severity and then this person has also a schizoid disorder.” To think of oneself or others this way, is anything but helpful. Mental health issues do not sort themselves in such neat categories, that exist independently of each other. This way of describing a person’s state of mental health only confuses and stands in the way of actual healing. We as persons are not these seperate entities from our mental health – mental health issues do not operate on the outside of who we are, but they permeate us and our personhood. Of course we are more as a person than just our mental health issues as well. It is just not so black-and-white. Furthermore different aspects of mental health issues (what the ICD-10 is ready to diagnose as distinct disorders) are not seperate from each other either. Of course it is very important and helpful, to look at the different aspects of someone’s mental health struggles, but this needs to be done in a more holistic way. Healing does not happen through cutting off and suppressing certain aspects of us, but through integration and processing ( in whichever form that happens).

Furthermore there stands the question of the scientificness of these categories. By which I mean: How random vs. how empiricism and theory based are these categories? How much are they routed in a causal understanding? These questions, I feel, are particularly relevant in connection with such diagnosis such as BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder), that is a conglomerate of many symptoms, of which only around 60% have to be present to be diagnosed as such. While furthermore at the same time the DSM-5 falls completely short in giving a causal or whatsoever explanation of why these symptoms belong with each other.

This of course is just a brief and thoroughly incomplete excursion into the topic. But I feel it is important to also point out within this discussion the economic reality of the ICD-10. The ICD-10 holds such a prominent position as a diagnostic tool only because it is used by therapists and psychiatrists to bill insurance companies. Insurance companies do not know how to cope with more holistic and therefore vague, unique diagnosis – it would cost a lot more money if the insurance companies had to study the intricate details of individual diagnosis for their internal statistics. The therapist/psychiatrist complex who want to get paid for their work, therefore perpetrate the story of mental health being such a neat categorizable realm, since this puts them in favor with the insurancy companies. And so they shake each others hand, since it works for them well, while patients are given unfitting diagnosis and a tool of self-conceptualization that stands in the way of their actual healing (and this is not because the therapists/psychiatrist “mis-diagnoses” them, but because the diagnostic system is in itself just crap).

Acute Dysregulation

Oh what a doozy! Only my second day, and I am having an emotional emergency. Total emotional dysregulation. So what I am writing now is going to be a mess. But as I promised myself, this is not going to stop me writing. Just it certainly won’t be great.

Maybe talk about dysregulation? This concept in the context of trauma and CPTSD. The much higher likelihood for becoming dysregulated and the inability to re-regulate onself. Meaning in layman’s terms, you get easily freaked out and once you are, you are stuck. I am not going to talk about what triggered me like this, at least not while I am still dysregulated. But you guys can believe me it was something objectively really minor. Someone without CPTSD would barely bat an eye over this, maybe have a brief sense of annoyance for 5 minutes and then forget about it. Not like me though, this has been going on for 4 hours now. And I am only a tiny bit more relaxed than I was right after it happened. Total freak out state. And just in such an emotional emergency my brother’s phone seems to be switched off, as my text hasnt gone through for 3,5 hours now. Perfect. But I am proud that I have at least tried a few things to re-regulate. Which as such is a bit of a success, since my natural impulse is to simply crawl into my own skin and hide from the world for the next three days. And just watch Netflix (my go to self medication, which does not re-regulate but is even more effective than Valium in numbing the terror). I have vented by writing, have tapped my body, did some hip opening (for grounding). And all I can say though, is that I am surprisingly still alive. Even though the desire to just vanish is huge. Just find my cave, my inner cave, and go into hibernation. Let the world do its thing on its own for a while and only come outside again, when the sun has returned.

Struggling with wordpress – blog intention – sleep – transparency

First of all I have to say that a lot has changed since I last used the wordpress admin panel and wordpress.com. And the way that things are now it is a pain in the ass. It seems that I have to re-learn everything again. I just wanted to quickly get to writing my first post and now I have spent 30 minutes helplessly clicking forth and back to get just the basic structure and design set-up.

Well I guess that is just another example of how our own expectations can trip us up. Especially when we have a sense of urgency (for whatever reason) and therefor are unwilling to take the time to adapt to changing circumstances. Well in this case I was lucky and made it through the clicking-jungle, but this could have easily end up in me putting aside the whole blogging idea for now, because stupid wordpress.com has changed its admin UI to a degree I cannot simply just jump in. Let’s thank the powers at play for now, that this did not happen 🙂

This blog is not supposed to be ONLY a tool for me to vent and share, but really primarily should serve the purpose of supporting people in healing their mental health issues. I want people who read on my blog to really take something away for themselves. I want to support them in their healing process.

Fact is though that the term “mental health” contains a great variety of problems and issues. Which logically means, that what I have to give – coming from my specific mental health circumstances – will only serve some of the people who struggle with mental health. It is important to keep this awareness of the limitations of my healing methods and process in mind, when writing on this blog. Because what I certainly don’t want is that people who are struggling already will feel at fault if what I have to suggest does not help them. It is not because they haven’t tried hard enough or because there is something inherently wrong and unhealable with them, but that simply this specific method does not work for them. It’s a question of incompatibility. The problems they have and the complexity of who they are is not served by what I have to give.

One of the core issues I will focus on first in this blog is sleep. Since sleep is such a crucial factor in my mental health. And from what I have observed in others, this holds true almost everyone. For most people lack of good sleep automatically leads to a worsening of their mental health. And I want to not only focus on how to have a better sleep, but also on how to manage the day better with an unfortunate lack of sleep in regards to healing and to a sustainable performing throughout the day.

There will certainly be days when my posts will devolve into an unstructured ranting/venting style. Because on my bad days, this will be the best I can come up with. And I am intentionally making the choice to still post on the bad days for several reasons:

My own sense of continuity and commitment. I want the blog to be a continious thing, that I feel committed to.
I want others to have a transparent insight into how I am when I am not well. I believe that mental health issues can only be understood in the abstract to some degree, to really understand how things are like, you need to be as close to the action as possible. Having me vent on my bad days, will be a valuable insight for my readers.
By posting on these bad days, I kind of want to say to them: Look here, this might not be the greatest, most polished aspect of who I am – but this is still me and I am ok with that. It is a little contribution in overcoming the stigma of it all. A contribution on overcoming shame.