\*sigh\*  If you like long rambling... here I am!  I am a 35/F happily married to a 44/M.  We have one human daughter and one cat and one fish.  We live in Western Canada and like to garden and enjoy outdoor living in our small oasis we planted from the sod up.  

In my family, on the maternal side (which is the only side that matters to mental health apparently), EVERYONE has a diagnosis.  And depending on what it is, that's how you are treated.  Because you're In Treatment right? And Knowledge is how you Break the Cycle of Abuse right?  Oh boy, you don't know my family very well!  Did I mention one of my family members worked as a psychiatric nurse for 40-some-odd years?  

Goodness, where do I start?  Now why am I here?  Well obviously maintaining one's mental health isn't easy.  I have more than enough ACE's to qualify for any doctor's quack experiments!  What's an ACE?  Oh that's just short for Adverse Childhood Experience!  If you have 1 or 2 or 3 of these things happen in your life before 12 years old, you'll supposedly be fine.  But if you have more than 3 or any combo of them happening simultaneously, you're high-class, quality fodder for a test study.  or as my dark sense of humor quantifies it, "you're fucked up".

Google "ACE test" - NPR has a good online quiz on their website about it.  

I have like, 7 different ACE's.  \*golf clap, yay go me!\* So?  what's the problem you say?  Just get a therapist!

Ahhhhhhhh... how do I say this without getting jumped all over?  Therapy and all mental health stuff is one of my SERIOUS Triggers.  I cannot go to therapy... I have TRIED.  It is not healthy for me.  I have ruminated for months about WHY NOT.  I think I finally have an answer, though it is not an answer that will satisfy anyone who knows me IRL who is just like, "Go see a therapist!"  :-p  

So when I was a tweenager, feeling those ordinary out-of-control tweenage emotions, Mom figured, hey I could use a counsellor to talk about my feelings.  Okay Mom - fun fact: I have Emotions about Things for Reasons.  If you actually resolve the problem by addressing the Reasons, you will find that I don't have Emotions about Things.  LALALALALA there goes my Mom again, finding me a new counsellor when I say, "this doesn't work".  

You know why this doesn't work?  Because I ALREADY told you the Reason why I am a stubborn, defiant, pissy brat.  YEARS ago, Mom.  Don't you remember?  And you looked down at me and said, "that has nothing to do with it.  you choose your attitude and you're doing this to yourself."  But of course, this Reason would actually require my own mother to:

1) admit her guilt 

2) force her to do something about it 

3) live with the consequences

Said Reason?  Oh, just that by the time I was 5-6, I had really HAD IT with my alcoholic father wreaking havoc on the family dynamic.  So I gave my parents some Solid Life Advice from a 5 year old, seeming to comprehend what TV, books and peers said was The Answer to my Secondary Problem (my primary problem being religion).  So I wanted him to either successfully go to rehab OR I wanted him to divorce my mom and move out of our house so I could move on with life.  

Yeah I know.    Seems pretty cut and dry.  But of course, "I wuuuuuuuuuuuuuuv your father and I forgive him," was always the standard.  Nobody cared that I had not forgotten, forgiven or was even given a consideration in all this.  I was and still am pretty infuriated about this prevailing attitude in society of "who cares what the kids want or feel, let's just be adults and make choices and say 'too bad' if the kid cries due to the aftermath."

If I had a penny for every time someone has started a sentence with, "But they're your father/mother...." I would have a trust fund large enough for Elon Musk to pedal me around in a rickshaw.

They are my biological parents.  They abused me.  These are facts.  There is no wiggling around this.  

Geez Mom.  Other women get divorced over really simple things like where and to whom their husband is rubbing his genitalia on.  Other people simply get divorced because "they change their minds and aren't compatible".  If people are allowed to divorce over really anything, well, a neglectful alcoholic who can't hold down a job and doesn't come home at night sounds like a Very Good Reason to hire a lawyer.  

Oh right but thanks to an oppressive cult that Mom has become baptised into, we cannot be a single female-headed household.  Abused, Neglected, Disrespected, But Married! that's what we want ; Divorced we cannot have.  

I'll rant about the religious aspect for only a moment.  Being in a cult as a child when your parent has converted means being ostracized, shunned, and brainwashed/unvalidated by any Adult you encounter, and it requires a lot of mental energy to secretly keep your own identity, while struggling with the confusion of, "But what if all the Adults are right and I'm NOT good enough for God?"  To add icing to this cake, my mom decided to keep me enrolled in public school the whole time - because otherwise I might cost MORE money.  ;) Meanwhile the other kids in my congregation were being home-schooled so they didn't have to deal with things like having every single item in your desk AND locker vandalised and broken, being ridiculed by the entire class and teacher over not getting any Christmas presents, and spending recess clinging to the tallest part of the tallest tree while the other kids threw rocks and dog feces.  

So ... Mom thinks I just need a counsellor.  Okay, that's great until the counsellor realizes that, "the broken things in my teenaged client's life CAN be fixed!  let's tell the mother this exciting news!"  only to have their cute little therapist dreams crushed when my mother points out, "My marriage is between me and my husband."  Nooooooooooo Mom, you might be married but now you have reproduced and brought another human into the world ; you DO have to consider their feelings too!  So we did this fun little therapist shopping thing.  I guess I went through about 5-6 of them before Mom got the idea that I just needed to be medicated.  That's what would fix my attitude - DRUGS!  

See, Mom also had been trying to figure out what was wrong with HER.  And granted, there were definitely Reasons.  Good Reasons.  I will let y'all know now that she is FINALLY on a cocktail of pills that she depends on hourly for her definition of normal... but as one of her pills is thyroid medication, we don't know what we can blame on the mental illnesses since her doctors tried some extreme treatments that probably damaged her thyroid (if it was EVER working properly), large doses of Lithium and electro-shock treatment to be precise.  Anyway.  Mom's been in-and-outpatient, she's got a suitcase of pills like Hunter S. Thompson, and she thinks Medical Science holds the answer for me, too.  Yay.  Don't I sound excited?  And she has all the books I'll ever need, don't you know?  There have been stacks of mental health literature ALL OVER ever since I can remember, due to my mom's career field, and the family member who worked in mental health.  Because you know, reading a book on dysfunctional families and NOT following any of the advice sounds like it will make everything  better, right?  I can QUOTE parts of "Walking on Eggshells" and the DSM.  \*shudder\*  

But ... Treating Your Mental Health sucks when every single moment can be referenced to a chapter in a workbook.  Did you fill out your tracking sheets yet?  Have you done that soul-searching?  Did you take your PILLS?!  

Mom pretty much forced me to read everything and anything she could get her hands on, so I wouldn't "feel alone" about these feelings I was having.  I was reading fiction like "Girl, Interrupted" while trying to digest the jargon of medical journals.  I was being "inspired" by reading biographies of all the famous people who Might Have Had a Mental Illness.  YAY I'm just like Abraham Lincoln!  So rewarding....  I was taking my four-times-a-day doses of medication and keeping a detailed log of their side effects.  I took all the pills that the doctors and their drug reps could peddle, even the ones that could give you incurable leprosy!  YAY.  Sorry no leprosy, all I got out of that was a crippling effect of vertigo and a tendency to go into heatstroke.    

But ... you know what?  trying to make my Mental Health a full-time job was exhausting.  And it didn't solve anything anyway!  I don't care that I feel this way, I care that I feel this way because \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ happened and my Adults ignored my feelings.  Every Single Time.  You know what would solve my problems?  An Adult actually going, "Wow, yeah, totally if we do A, B, and C, this would make a real difference in your life!"  As you can guess from my username... none of my Adults came through for me on that.  That's so nice that everyone wants me to practice coping skills while NOT removing the stressors in life.  Plus don't you Adults realize that I also have to somehow go to school, do homework, take care of all my pets, do my chores and take care of my asthma before I deal with my Journalling and my Self-Care? HA!  Plus feed myself and sleep.  You don't do any of that anymore.  

Yeah teaching your child coping skills for toxic stress so that you can continue with Your Personal Status Quo is just... unbelievably fucked up IMHO.  But some people call this Parenting.

Anyway, I finally escaped and immigrated to Canada.  So excited to leave the medical records behind!  Mom wanted me to pay $5 a page to have them transferred to my new doctor's office.  I laughed and changed the subject.

So therapy and treatment and workbooks just make me ANGRY.  I rage far too much as it is.  Today I lost my mind over a newspaper article - an injustice done to a complete stranger in a different town!  Not my circus, not my monkeys, but too damned late for my blood pressure.  I do not want to talk to someone who has NOTHING to do with the situation about how I FEEL about it!  

And I have to remind myself ONE MORE TIME that the angry ramble is from my past.  I have nothing to fear but fear itself.  Cue another motto and tagline from a well-read mental health book.

I personally have come to the conclusion that the only cure for my BPD, if there is indeed one, is to become Buddhist.  I kind of giggle about how Marsha Linehan has made her CAREER out of basically translating Buddhist readings into Western mumbo-jumbo that is easily digested for people who cannot or do not want to conduct the Hard Work that is spirituality.  Not that I am being NEGATIVE about this at all!  I just think it is far beyond ironically amusing.  I came to this conclusion while meditating in the Buddhist area of our local museum, trying to refresh my energy levels and suddenly it was a flash of enlightenment LOL  

Life is suffering.  Suffering is desire.  Alleviate the attachment to desire and you alleviate the suffering.  Take out the mystical esoteric B.S. and you get the basic core of distress tolerance skills.  Life sucks, we have little control except how we choose to react to a situation.  

I mean, I'm not saying that people who live in a Buddhist country don't have mental illness!  But I want to think that the constant and ever-present skill of mindfulness is much more actively practiced.  I mean that is kind of how yoga eventually became all trendy and popular, isn't it?  It became a way of life to enough people who went to India and learned yoga, that it became a Thing to Do in Western culture.  Now I try to make sure there is a visual of Buddha in my life at all times because it easily brings me back to that calm mental space of compassion and self-acceptance.  so. much. mindfulness.  it's still exhausting but it doesn't come with a checklist or an appointment or bloodwork.

I even tried going to a therapist here in Canada.  But again, therapists can't interfere in your toxic relationships, help you manipulate your Abusers, or do anything but ask you, "and how does that make you feel?  What are your goals on that topic?"  and the last and final straw for me was when the therapist wrote down a helpful list of books I should take a look at.  Oh look, my Childhood Textbooks! Yes reading more triggering material TOTALLY will make this better!  

Wouldn't it be nice if instead of "Mental Health Awareness - text 09876 and donate!" campaigns that happened annually, it was just standard workplace procedure to attend a Tai Chi class before clocking in?  

Wouldn't it be nice if instead of your managers demanding, "No personal cell phones", there was binaural music in the background of your office?  And actual sunlight available in your break room?

Wouldn't it be nice if more meditation spaces existed in middle/high schools rather than competitive sports that celebrate aggression?

So ... if I go on an angry rant... please just listen to me.  The best way that I have found to tackle my mental health issues is to figure out "WHY" people did these things to me.  If I understand their pain, I can lift that wet blanket off my back.  I feel like the knowledge releases the negative energy associated with the pain, and once I am not as attached to the pain, I can accurately shift blame from myself to the other person.  If I'm not holding their pain, it doesn't need to weigh me down. IT WAS NOT MY FAULT.  IT WAS NEVER MY FAULT.  I am a simple ant caught in the force of a garden hose.  

I will happily provide internet hugs and brownies when people need it.  Thank you for reading all of that... if you managed to.  