Condition's diary or YOUR OWN...

!!!!!HURRAY!!!!!
Today is a great day!!! It is the day that I have been looking forward to over the last month…! It is my very own Christmas, :-D, because I wasn’t really able to enjoy a 100% pressure-free Christmas because of all the work for January hanging over me… My last exam was today, it is over, all my essays, assignments and first draft of thesis have been handed in, phew…
I feel free!!! I will have ten pressure-free, obligation-free days until the second semester starts on 1st Feb… haha, I’ve been dreaming to be able to read a normal, non-academic book for so long… or just hanging around… or going for a swim, or a walk along the wild Donegal beaches… sitting in front of the fire, having a lovely glass of wine, or two, with my lovely girlfriend… And have the time to read and write Iceberg-contributions without this little niggling thought of… “Ah, I really should be doing something else now…studying, reading essays, doing translation, working on grammar…”

ON WRITING

During my recovery I am becoming more and more aware of the POWER OF WORDS, the power of our language, and thus the power of our self-talk… Ok, I must say, this was something that was again and again pointed out to me by my therapists, the care workers, in group… but do you think I really got it? No, I was very resistant, my condition acted incredibly stubborn, my own self-belief was so minute, and I had no real trust in anybody, myself included… So I didn’t really take that in what I was told…
I admire the persistence of my therapists actually, really admire it, the PATIENCE they showed towards me, repeating the same thing over and over and over again…and they would just NEVER GIVE UP on me… really, this is actually something that amazes me the most…the fact that they never ever gave up on me… thus, it was really their believe in my ability to recover fully that helped to keep me going…

But the work as such, believe it or not, somehow was done by myself…

One of the most important steps, I realised, was the way I changed my language when writing…and this is what I want to focus on here.

When I speak of WRITING I mean two situations of writing:

• Journaling, writing diary day-to-day…
• Writing on message boards, forums, support forums on the Internet…

I have been writing diary on and off throughout my life… when I was travelling on my own, this often turned into the most colourful and thick descriptions of experiences, landscapes, peoples, events, happenings…especially in South America (hmmm, I’m drifting off dreaming a bit…)… This was good, positive, constructive writing…

But there was also the other side of journaling, one that I became more and more drawn into, and that in fact really pulled me down even further. I am talking about the pure writing down of my thoughts, stream of consciousness… This style had once been recommended to me in a therapy program prior to Marino, and I continued it for long time even during my attending the Marino Centre… I must say, I really thought that I did something positive there, I was convinced that writing down all my worries, and negative brain-content would help me off-load it and let me get on with life… But this is untrue… not when you are at the depth of the condition!!! Because, as you may know by now… the condition grabs every opportunity to tell you how horrible you are… and when you are vulnerable and weak, you really have to stay away from journaling in this way… EVERY WORD AND EVERY THOUGHT IS AN AFFIRMATION…
This was really detrimental to my recovery process and in a matter of fact, it was pure SELF-SABOTAGE, complete and utter SABOTAGE, and it was the best way to destroy, in a couple of minutes, the benefit of a whole therapy session…
Of course, anything and everything I wrote was the most negative, most hideous, horrendous, terrible self-talk that was streaming through my consciousness. In this way I repeated to myself, over and over again, all the negative and destructive thoughts and NEGATIVE AFFIRMATIONS. How can anybody recover if s/he writes condition-talk… actually the diaries, I realise now, are not really mine, they are condition… reading back through them it feels like a black cloud amassing over my head, a cold hand clasping my heart, it is suffocating…

I realised that to support the recovery process I had to change my writing style… not writing my condition thoughts any longer, but write neutral or even positive things… I don’t say this was that easy, it felt as if my hand had to be forced to write “I am ok” instead of “…***…”. Sometimes I would just copy the paragraph from the ‘Recovery Now’ for that day… No matter how I felt, even completely and utterly distressed and disconnected from whatever I had written, AT LEAST I had written SOMETHING POSITIVE. If you write for several days pages after pages of “I’m ok”…at some stage your sub-conscious starts to listen…

If you’d open my diary now, you’d see things like:
“GOOD MORNING my dear R. Well, another day to be lived… I’m going to have a good day today. Everything that is going to happen is something I can and will handle…” …ok, I admit… sometimes I’m winging a bit, “ah, I feel tired today, why did I have to watch this late film last night… No, stop R., you chose to watch it because you really liked the actor, so you enjoyed it, didn’t you?...”
So, you see… ha, my diary is a mad mess of lovely weird, contradictory things… But I never ever let a negative feeling or expression stand there without at least writing STOP behind it… In fact, I am applying the Iceberg rules in my diary now…keep it positive and constructive, supportive and helpful…or I decide that, well, I shall bring this to my next one-to-one…
Oh yes, and I am learning to write some praise there sometime, like, well done with not letting the essays stress you out… ☺

Anyway, this is enough for the moment

So remember: Everything you think, write, say to yourself, every word is an affirmation…and the condition is vicious and clever and logs into every possibility to keep us down…so watch what you are thinking, saying, writing…and should you catch your condition talking away in your head, or on your journal page…close the door on her, slam the door in her face and keep her locked out…

Love,
xxx R. xxx