ADHD, Trauma, Mental Health and a Pandemic.

 ADHD, trauma  and mental health problem have many overlapping characteristics. One of them is a low threshold for stress. In order to function well people who struggle with these issues need a solid template.

What does that mean? 

If they can have a checklist of  how to function with a perceived threat, it feel much safer and easier to navigate. That sounds great, since we have all sorts of rules in this pandemic  to provide that, correct?

So that should really help..... except it doesn’t. Here are a few reasons why......  One is hyper vigilance, many of these challenges come with the ability to see everything that could possibly be a threat and then instantaneously sort it. This helps create a sort of a template for approaching danger. This matters because they are in a constant state of hyper vigilance and in order to effectively cope with life, they create a sorting process of dangers. These people may be some of the brightest minds you might know, but they walk a fragile sort of existence.

Let’s enter a pandemic, or at least a perceived pandemic, one where media is constantly bombarding this person with the dangers. Now we have a significant increase in hyper arousal, and fear. The scanning for danger increases, but now they don’t know where it is, which means a VERY  large  increase in fear. 

Another tool relied heavily on for these people is facial, body and voice recognition. So they are scanning body language, voice inflection and facial expressions. Now we add masks. Masks impede voice inflection,  and facial expressions, which makes other body language far more difficult to read.  This alone can put someone into a state of fear. But many of these people have developed coping strategies that through these same means, facial expression, tone of voice, they can soothe their own constant hyper arousal. But now when they go out, they are bombarded with fear, advertisements on the radio, signage in each business, “snitch lines”, fines etc, all to reinforce the fear. 

 Now what has been lost in navigating this overwhelming regular state of panic is connection with people, no smile from a stranger, or friendly  conversation in a checkout line. Very concerning because There is no longer a way to escape the fear, grief or depression from the constant overwhelm of these emotions. Simple strategies like taking your kids out the park with friends(because we have closed those parks), walking through the mall and feeling the energy (you can do that, but you are completely alone, no faces), going to the gym to clear some of that excess fear energy (unless you have money and can afford a personal trainer each time you go). I could go on about coping mechanisms, but I think you get the idea. 

We have essentially removed the healthy ones.  So what do we have left to help sort the normal day to day life hyper arousal and awareness as well as the pandemic emotions and fear?

First of all it depends on the person and how they are able to cope and how much money they.......🤔 Hhhhmmmm that seems concerning.. 

One person might dive into compliance as a  away to feel less helpless, but if they do, it is possible that fear and anger from any non compliance could be very high and could possibly lead to some very destructive actions, so that they maintain their feeling of safety. They may be so afraid that they are unable to work or go out, or they may feel safe enough with their construct of rules that they can. They may constantly bombard others with the “why are you so selfish” messages, in hopes that others will recognize their needs and help calm their fear by joining the compliance. They have no concept of how this may damage any demographic but themselves, why? Fear is too deep. 

Another person may feel so completely overwhelmed by the myriad of rules and details, that in order to cope they must ignore them all. Now, this response stems from an overload of fear stimulating actions required to now operate on a basic level in society.  That can leave them with complete overwhelm to the point of breakdown, similar to the above who copes by over protection, this copes by being incapable of managing any more protective measures than they are already navigating to keep mental health state. 

We may see a number of different approaches here, angry flagrant opposition, quiet noncompliance coping. Either way we have a person struggling to navigate all the pieces society requires. Similarlysending messages to other to join their method of coping.

Either way both are struggling to navigate the fear, aggression and constant bombardment of the issues.

After writing this, it struck me that most of us may fall into this category, unable to process the fear and losses of human connection, like breathing in a smile and conversation with a friend or stranger like fresh air.........Feeling safe to walk out the door of your home, take a night off and go for dinner and some live music, get a rush from a good workout, or just go to work and provide for your family without fear....

What about mental health???

If a person received a substantial physical injury, it would be understood that the process of healing would require time, loving support and patience.  There would be moments of frustration as the perceived time line does not meet the expectations of growth.  There would be no shame in asking for help or in using crutches to allow for protection from further injury.  It would be understood that dedicated time for appointments, for professionals, for tools to support healing and decrease pain, all would be needed.  We would not be afraid to ask for help when needed.

But what of emotional/spiritual wounds……….?

I am working on a project for one of my classes in school and for my own personal interest, on emotional health.  I noticed a few things, terribly high expectations for completion of the process, (“ of getting better”), an inability to ask for and find help(shame), a lack of understanding as to how these problems manifest themselves, and therefore how to and who to ask for help from, and a difficulty in stopping and allowing themselves to take the needed time and space for their needs, to heal rather than just band-aid the problem.

In my studies it has become remarkably clear that the implications of emotional or mental pain and injury has direct correlations to the physical.  When we look at the emotions we can see the body and when we look at the body we can see the emotions, so though we may try, we are never really hiding from our pain, just hiding behind something.  In order to start the process of healing, you must hear and see all of you.  You must acknowledge and see how you are holding each piece inside you. 

The process of healing, holds all of you.  Uncovering the language is a process and takes time.  Be as gentle and understanding with yourself as though it were your leg that is broken rather than your heart or mind.  They will heal, today is the first step, today is the only day that you must be present with on this journey.

Josh Groban - Falling Slowly [Live]

HOPE

I love reading some people's blogs because they can just say what they want to say and then get on

with it. I have trouble doing that. I always feel like I have to see everything there is to see about it and

 explain everything that I know so that it will make perfect sense. I know there is a place for that,

maybe if you are a researcher, but I am not. Sometimes I am just scared to just say what I think and feel

without having any real reason, just because my heart felt something.

Today I was feeling physically tired and kind of weak, but I have been running and couldn't stop. Not

because there wasn't a space to, but because I couldn't let myself, for fear of failing, not doing enough,

not being enough. I have worn myself out for the last few months, partly out of delight and desire to be

doing what I am doing, but partly just because I am afraid. The fear and the sadness run with me every

day. So to escape I escape into study, creating, sometimes loving and being with people. It isn't all

unhealthy, but today was.

I was not feeling well at all and when I finally stopped and asked the question why I realized I had not

eaten anything solid for twenty four hours. I can list a ton of reason why, midterms, smoothies are my

fall back, but it really comes down to be afraid to be totally connected to my own feelings. It is

terrifying to admit that I am afraid of speaking my own truth. I am afraid to say I am sad, there has been

so much loss that I haven't even begun to figure out to process. And I am afraid that if I hear and speak

I become vulnerable; I ache to NOT hold it all by myself, but the walls have been built and are tall and

strong and breaking them down is no small feat. Each step is tiny, going to school, speaking up for

what I see and putting myself out to contribute in the ways that I love and connecting with people

whose resonance I just love to take in, but it is all terrifying in its own right. Some

days I can hold it up to the light and say I am afraid, but I know why and I am ok. Here and now I am

ok, so I will take this step.

Today I realized I had moved past being able to hold it up and look and moved directly into disconnect.

The fear too much, the sadness too deep and so I stand here now, needing to stop and hold it up. 

Somethings I cannot fix and the pain will always be so deeply in my heart, others weave in and out

bringing hope insight and joy as they weave in and out of the sadness. I am not my fear today, it is with

me. My sadness is a gift, when it rises to be heard and I can't eat and move I know I have to stop and

listen. I have to be gentle, like I am with all the beautiful people that I cherish and I have to remember I

am one of them.

The feelings so hard to feel, are the gift. I fight the battle every day of what it feels like to belong in my

own skin with my own heart. It has begun to be a beautiful journey and I am really beginning to like

myself and find such delight and meaning in the process of becoming. Some days I hit my threshold

and it impacts how I treat myself and how I love myself. But today I remember, and I know this…..I

am not the sum total of the mark I got on my midterm, the approval of others because of where I may or

may not sit on Sunday, what I eat, what I drink, what I

wear, but only how I love. How love lives in me.

So, today, letting go, stopping, listening, perhaps to the tears, the inability to put food in my mouth, or

some other symptoms that is calling for my heart to listen. Today I am listening. And tomorrow will 

will have hope for a different story because today I listened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTQZ_5Ar_Vo&list=RDGMEMQ1dJ7wXfLlqCjwV0xfSNbAVMmkxZsKDeIss&index=5

DREAMS…………..

Dreams locked away and looking from the outside in. The place you wish for is unattainable. The price is simply too great. The ability to perform to receive the stipend of acceptance and belonging, they simply come from a place without understanding. But I look and I know it is in my mind. I ask how did the idea get there. The feeling that you are taking up too much space in the world, if you speak and hope for an answer, if you want something and it escapes your lips.

The ideas, the feelings, the hurt , you want to just throw them away,and leap into a reality that you can see and feel, as though it were a dream. There is this sense that something bigger than life itself is speaking , but when you take the step and begin to walk into the dream, all the fear comes flying at you, the attack, the forces that want you to stop, then laugh at the idea that your feelings are a voice, that has a gentle place in the world. The idea that you can see your self as more than waiting in the wings. The idea that people will want you, for nothing more than who you are, not some bejeweled offering of greatness, not a piece of paper, not the works that someone else chooses for you to be great…………. but for your soul; its light, standing there, hoping to shine bringing its intensity and love to the world.

If only the fear were not so great, so great that you could not step, leave, move, in the very direction of the dream that holds your heart. Can you hear the world, not the people, but the power, forces energies and love calling you out? Can you hear? They are not calling for "greatness", but simply for your life, your love, and your existence to join the forces of love. To grow the integrity of love and the freedom that we are all yearning for.

You can choose to allow your heart to feel, the love, the sadness, the grief, the injustice, and then be moved………… calling the rest of you, giving your mind the direction to go. Hear and take heed, then allow that mind direct you to unlock the doors. Be wise with your heart and allow it to take its proper place, feel deeply, whether for happiness or sadness, they are friends, speaking of your needs. Their purpose is to call out the rest of your strengths, to create your life.

Emotions are invitations, not a moment of panic or pleasure, but something that needs tending, planning and directing. Every day there needs to be hope, hope for the freedom from the oppression of fear and disbelief. Every day their needs to be hope, that you will be heard. Some days you are tired, but do not mistake depression for fatigue and the need to rest, carefully hear the sadness and find the place it is moving you towards, the place behind the fear. Believe the message it is speaking. You can talk yourself out of the message, but it will come back louder and louder. So just listen to it without fear or judgment When you listen, you find the love you have been yearning for, not in another person, in yourself. Love yourself, no matter what shape or size, no matter how accomplished you wish to be, no matter how afraid, just start with love today, there is lots to love. The universe is filled with love and it filled you with its love.

Now go, open that package and find out what is inside.

I Choose Love………..

I hate those moments when I feel the block to something important to understand, but I cannot find it on a conscious level, can't find the words. It is lost and locked somewhere inside. I can't get past the fear. I want to look like someone who my mother will love, or the person that others will look up to. Smetimes I want it so much, I try to create it by drawing the picture in my mind of what it should look like. The person will be brave and strong and always supportive of others, never tire and always love. She will have endless perspective and insight into all of he difficulties she might find and they will never stop her from completing what tasks those outside, those in the periphery would deem as faithful, making her worthy. The picture is beautiful, except achingly empty. The reality, forced behind the curtains of tears, wiped up before they have spilled from her eyes. The longing, replaced with a forced desire for what is prescribed. The dreams, locked away in favor of what should be, the ache of what might be is kept tightly out of reach of her heart, lest it crumble after all of the years of loss.
The problem with this design, is that it cannot be done without cost. The cost: the heart. The cost: dreams of the future , belonging to your own heart. The cost is all of that,not just the word heart, not just the word dream or future, no the cost is the real thing. This is not about the painted version that fits into someone else's timeline and version of your life. IT is the one, if given up leaves you broken in grief, bent and weeping in agony of the loss. This time it is real, not just one you can sweep under the rug of excuses, of intellectual reasons that your create to try and justify the belief that says you cannot really live, your life is a placeholder for everyone else. And you believe it, happily. But when something comes along that you can no longer sweep under the rug, That loss, the one you cannot choose whether you will feel or not, because it is exploding out of every pore of your being. So many things you have never let yourself feel, this one sets them all free, a torrent, a bursting of a dam. Past are the moments of trying to create the reason and the meaning so as to be able to continue to suppress the realness of your being, the woman that aches to be held and known and seen. The mother that wants her child to come home, even though his headstone has been laid. The woman facing rejection again in love. The woman, has doesn't face rejection, because she goes unseen.

How do we get past the words, the words hold us hostage. The words cannot tell the story of not belonging in an empty world, a world of walking dead a world of pretense, pasted smiles amidst, burgeoning symptomology crying out for release. There is more, those beliefs stops us from seeing ourselves. We get out our box and nicely put all the pieces together to fit inside it, when our emotions, our feelings our desires and our vision do not fit in the box, we rearrange them and hide them and fit them into the box in pieces, the heart now in pieces fits in the box. But it can never be held, nor can it feel, not in pieces, it continues to bleed, covering all that we believe is good in our blood, leaving us to wonder how all of this became covered in so much wreckage.
The realization is: walls must come down. You alone have the answer, you with God. NOt you with the man made God of someone else, no the God that speaks only to you, the one that is the creator of love and holds yours deeply, no hostage is exchange for a few trite words and phrases, no not that God. This is the God of life, your life. He made you. You are his, he knows you and, you know him, not through someone or something else, but through your own soul, emotions desires feelings and life. The answer lies inside your heart and its desires, they came from him. That is the long way, not quick fix, no pat answer to fix everything that is breaking your heart, and try to make the destroyed heart, that has been created seem as though it is a good thing. No, no more of that. The good thing about that damaged heart is that where it is leading you. Then on that path you can finally start to listen. No more excuses about how the heart is not really broken, that it is supposed to be this way. IT is really broken, really damaged and won't heal until you finally see it for what it is.

So, You start to walk, you walk away from those things that hold no life and no love. You walk faster and faster until you gain strength and desire is pushing you forward into what you have always wanted to be, always were, but never believed. The beautiful thing is that all the things that are real, they come too. Your love, for the people dear to you. It comes to. It does not become lost because you become found. It becomes more powerful and poignant and more fresh and beautiful in the perspective of a living heart and soul instead of the heart in pieces packed in a box. So, I chose love, the heart made whole. I chose love.

There is a moment, over and over again to chose love. Christ made everything hang on love. IT seems to be backwards everywhere I look. He did not ask us to do everything and then try and include love. That is why we can sit in places that are supposed to be inviting healing and they do not heal, they simply are not based on love. When it is there, there is no question. Love is the force that created life, it designed the universe, makes the oceans ebb and flow. Love has paved the way for everything that matters. Love speaks the message. Love needs no words. Love created us. When we love, there is energy and power. No one can tell you if it is not there, it is undeniable. WIth love there is perspective, without fear.The space holds itself without my help. That is how powerful love is No, nothing comes before love. And nothing comes after. IT is everything in between. IF you watch you can see it. If you listen you can hear it. If you stop and be still you can feel it. So, I choose love and I choose life. I am letting go, for only in letting go of what is not love can I fully embrace what is.
Now I know, why sometimes I get stuck and can't find the words, I have simply fallen out of love. I chose love again and again. When I forget and stumble, I know what it feels like, and I know my way back there. So today I chose love………………

If there were no love, there would be no grief………………………...

I have seen number of posts, and articles by parents that have lost a child, so really articles on grief. All of them written shortly after the loss. The feelings are deep and so poignant, and at that time, the compassion flowing in is abounding and the whole world is revolving around the loss, every breathe, every thought, everything that you see and that you do is surrounded by it, And it feels like the world should stop. it weaves itself into every heartbeat on a very conscious level.

The weaving, that is where it starts to get difficult. It is in every moment that used to be "normal" changing the perception, and the response to those moments. A wedding, can be wrapped in both deep sorrow and sweet joy as you put the pictures of the newly married couple on the wall, next to the picture of your child that is now timeless. Children growing up, taking normal risks, needing to leap, those can hold undercurrents of the final leap and breath you watched your child take. The essence of life is now permanently changed. While your loving friends and family wonder when you will " move on" or be your old self again………….. It is important to note that the old self is now gone. The innocence is lost. You can never have it back again, never live in the place without the loss. Others can only dream about what it might feel like and how it would affect their life, but at the end of the dream they get to wake up to their child's laughter, their innocence intact. But for those of us carrying this loss, we never get to wake up.

Yes, we still laugh and we still love and we still find meaning in small things, but behind it all lies a curtain of sorrow, that for the most part stays closed to the rest of the world. IT is understood and expected after the loss for tears to fall, for you to not be okay, while, but there comes a time in this unknown, uncharted, unmapped journey that you feel as though you really should be okay and you try to be and people may even think that you are, but underneath it all is the pictures and the feelings of watching one of the people that you have loved most in this world suffer, sometimes it feels like endlessly, over and over again and then become still. There is no idea, thought of rational understanding about this that can remove what you have seen. Suppressing it in favor other things to help you forget and feel blessed are at best a diversion, at most terribly hurtful.

And, when you feel the same kind of love in other parts of your life you become protective, kind of instinctively. You want to hold those people and never let them go. You want to freeze time and you want to remember and stay in the laughter and the magical moments that you remember, not just for the child that you have lost, but for all of them. And when life starts hurting the rest of those that you love, sometimes it becomes more than you can hold. The problem is that when time has passed and maybe now it has been years, you don't always know why….. Why when you sit with the others and talk and laugh and listen honestly to their heartaches, to the ups and downs of life, why when you leave you want to cry, why the pain sometimes feels unbearable. The memory of the source has dimmed, but the pain itself is still weaving itself through everything.

So sometimes unravelling the emotion has to be there first order of the day or nothing else can find a place past the first check mark on the list. The day can slip away as though in a fog and you can see nothing clearly. Stopping for the conscious recognition of the the fact that you are still breathing and still loving and no matter how far we get from the moment of the good-bye, it is still woven through every breath you have taken since then. It has created a picture that must be respected and honored. It must be heard, if you are going to live. When the day is swirling and you can't see where to start on the endless list of chores, work, study, even beautiful things, it is calling for you to stop and give it a moment maybe just gaze deeply at the picture that has woven itself and is creating your new life. It is okay even if time has passed to be okay and not okay, still, maybe even forever. You never stop loving and you will never forget. I think it is okay for life to never be able to look like it did before. It is okay to navigate new and complex ways of loving after the loss. It is okay to redefine yourself in a new way holding who you used to be wrapped securely in the knowing that love and loss has changed you forever.

So today wherever you are in the loss. Know, that it is not going anywhere. It will walk with you from room to room and color your world like a pair of rose colored glasses, only not always feeling rosy. In all of this, knowing that the tapestry woven through this story is unique and personal and is creating you.
Don't worry about being who you were ever again. That is an impossibility. You will and are becoming braver, brighter, more beautiful. That is the story that love always tells. You see, if there was no love, there would be no grief.