MK forum

mk chame wrote

"OH FYI I got accepted into the YWCA Sexual Assault Advocacy program. I start my training this week!"

Congratulations! You are what it says at the bottom of your poem a survivor in fact a super survivor. Wishing you much success as you help victims find out they also are survivors.

Thank you, mk chame, for sharing with us this glimpse deep into your pain.

You are very brave and very honest.

I hope that because of being here on Fanda Eagles with us, you now feel less invisible, and that you know you would be very, very missed.

You are not alone.

Hugs ...

For those who cannot understand why some people in deep, inescapable pain choose the option of leaving this life, I copy this post from Ann Voskamp's excellent blog. We really need to try to understand, and Ann's vivid words have helped me see through the eyes of my friends who long for death as a way to escape the never-ending pain of their life.

http://www.aholyexperience.com/



What Christians Need to Know about Mental Health

Dear Church,

Cancer can be deadly and so can depression.

So can the dark and the shame and the crush of a thousand skeletons, a thousand millstones, a thousand internal infernos.









We could tell you what we know.

That — depression is like a room engulfed in flames and you can’t breathe for the sooty smoke smothering you limp — and suicide is deciding there is no way but to jump straight out of the burning building.

That when the unseen scorch on the inside finally sears intolerably hot – you think a desperate lunge from the flames and the land of the living seems the lesser of two unbearables.

That’s what you’re thinking — that if you’d do yourself in, you’d be doing everyone a favor.

I had planned mine for a Friday.

That come that Friday the flames would be licking right up the the strain of my throat. You don’t try to kill yourself because death’s appealing — but because life’s agonizing. We don’t want to die. But we can’t stand to be devoured.

So I made this plan. And I wrote this note.

And I remember the wild agony of no way out and how the stars looked, endless and forever, and your mind can feel like it’s burning up at all the edges and there’s never going to be any way to stop the flame. Don’t bother telling us not to jump unless you’ve felt the heat, unless you bear the scars of the singe.

Don’t only turn up the praise songs but turn to Lamentations and Job and be a place of lament and tenderly unveil the God who does just that — who wears the scars of the singe. A God who bares His scars and reaches through the fire to grab us, “Come — Escape into Me.”

Nobody had told me that –

that one of the ways to get strong again is to set the words free.

You know — The Word that bends close and breathes warming love into the universe…. and the words mangled around swollen secrets and strangling dark — just let the Word, the words, all free in you.

My Dad, he had told me that if I told, it’d slit us all.

So much for believing the Truth will set you free. So much weight for a wide-eyed nine-year-old.

So I locked lips and heart hard so no one knew about the locked wards and the psychiatric doctors and why my mama was gone and it’s crazy how the stigma around mental health can drive you right insane.

There are some who take communion and anti-depressants and there are those who think both are a crutch.

Come in close — I’d rather walk tall with a crutch than crawl around insisting like a proud and bloody fool that I didn’t need one.

I once heard a pastor tell the whole congregation that he had lived next to the loonie bin and I looked at the floor when everyone laughed and they didn’t know how I loved my mama. I looked to the floor when they laughed, when I wanted them to stand up and reach through the pain of the flames and say:

Our Bible says Jesus said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a doctor, but those who are sick.” Jesus came for the sick, not for the smug. Jesus came as doctor and He makes miracles happen through medicine and when the church isn’t for the suffering, then the Church isn’t for Christ.

I wanted them to say it all together, like one Body, for us to say it all together to each other because there’s not one of us who hasn’t lost something, who doesn’t fear something, who doesn’t ache with something. I wanted us to turn to the hurting, to each other, and promise it till we’re hoarse:

We won’t give you some cliche – but something to cling to — and that will mean our hands.

We won’t give you some platitudes — but someplace for your pain — and that will mean our time.

We won’t give you some excuses — but we’ll be some example — and that will mean bending down and washing your wounds. Wounds that we don’t understand, wounds that keep festering, that don’t heal, that down right stink — wounds that can never make us turn away.

Because we are the Body of the Wounded Healer and we are the people who believe the impossible — that wounds can be openings to the beauty in us.

We’re the people who say: there’s no shame saying that your heart and head are broken because there’s a Doctor in the house. It’s the wisest and the bravest who cry for help when lost.

There’s no stigma in saying you’re sick because there’s a wounded Healer who uses nails to buy freedom and crosses to resurrect hope and medicine to make miracles.

There’s no guilt in mental illness because depression is a kind of cancer that attacks the mind. You don’t shame cancer, you treat cancer. You don’t treat those with hurting insides as less than. You get them the most treatment.

I wanted the brave to speak Truth and Love:

Shame is a bully and Grace is a shield. You are safe here.

To write it on walls and arms and wounds:

No Shame.
No Fear.
No Hiding.
Always safe for the suffering here.

You can be different and you can struggle and you can wrestle and you can hurt and we will be here. Because a fallen world keeps falling apart and even though we the Body can’t make things turn out — we can turn up. Just keep turning up, showing up, looking up.

Mama came Home and I found grace, a thousand, endless graces, and it is by grace we are saved, grace adopting us into a family that no illness can ever remove us from.

Grace, that miracle which even the darkest can’t consume, but only consumes you.

Light pried through the dark. A shaft came through a window like a lifeline. And the birds sang and we heard them.

We all to some extent exhibit and have symptoms of mental inbalance, it is part of being human. There really is no such thing as a "normal" person, just some are more normal than others.

I remember talking to a psychiatrist friend, who knew me well and his comment was "you are surprisingly normal, considering the bizare childhood" and I think he was right.

But for some, the road of recovery from the nightmares of childhood is just as rocky as it was all those decades ago. What do you do when you know where you came from was very wrong, but you can't see any alternative but to either go back into the situation you were with a good dose of forgiveness and memory lapse, or to call it a day on spirituality and go it alone. The former abdicates the power of independent thought and denying who one is, while the latter risks isolation.
Given that choice, what an MK needs is a good level headed caring person to talk to, who will not judge or try to convert and has an understanding of what MK life was/is like because they have had that experience. Alas for some of us there is no one who fits that description, therefore is it any wonder that some loose the will to carry on.

Thanks for posting this here. I had forgotten this thread existed.

We know that some have gone this way, but I'm certain that many of the abused can identify with these feelings.

Check out the site for the illustration. Are you in the center circle? Feel free to dump. We are all in the center circle at times, don't think you have to stay in an outer circle.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0407-silk-ring-theory-20130407,0,2074046.story


Susan Silk and Barry Goldman

April 7, 2013

When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan's colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn't feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague's response? "This isn't just about you."

"It's not?" Susan wondered. "My breast cancer is not about me? It's about you?"

The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit. She was no longer covered with tubes and lines and monitors, but she was still in rough shape. A friend came and saw her and then stepped into the hall with Katie's husband, Pat. "I wasn't prepared for this," she told him. "I don't know if I can handle it."

This woman loves Katie, and she said what she did because the sight of Katie in this condition moved her so deeply. But it was the wrong thing to say. And it was wrong in the same way Susan's colleague's remark was wrong.

Susan has since developed a simple technique to help people avoid this mistake. It works for all kinds of crises: medical, legal, financial, romantic, even existential. She calls it the Ring Theory.

Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. For Katie's aneurysm, that's Katie. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. In the case of Katie's aneurysm, that was Katie's husband, Pat. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order. One of Susan's patients found it useful to tape it to her refrigerator.

Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, "Life is unfair" and "Why me?" That's the one payoff for being in the center ring.

Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.

When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you're going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn't, don't say it. Don't, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don't need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, "I'm sorry" or "This must really be hard for you" or "Can I bring you a pot roast?" Don't say, "You should hear what happened to me" or "Here's what I would do if I were you." And don't say, "This is really bringing me down."

If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that's fine. It's a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.

Comfort IN, dump OUT.

There was nothing wrong with Katie's friend saying she was not prepared for how horrible Katie looked, or even that she didn't think she could handle it. The mistake was that she said those things to Pat. She dumped IN.

Complaining to someone in a smaller ring than yours doesn't do either of you any good. On the other hand, being supportive to her principal caregiver may be the best thing you can do for the patient.

Most of us know this. Almost nobody would complain to the patient about how rotten she looks. Almost no one would say that looking at her makes them think of the fragility of life and their own closeness to death. In other words, we know enough not to dump into the center ring. Ring Theory merely expands that intuition and makes it more concrete: Don't just avoid dumping into the center ring, avoid dumping into any ring smaller than your own.

Remember, you can say whatever you want if you just wait until you're talking to someone in a larger ring than yours.

And don't worry. You'll get your turn in the center ring. You can count on that.

Susan Silk is a clinical psychologist. Barry Goldman is an arbitrator and mediator and the author of "The Science of Settlement: Ideas for Negotiators."

There is a wide spectrum of coping mechanisms when faced with trauma and/or tragedy. There is also cultural applications too. For some a public display of grief is considered entirely appropriate, while at the other end is the stiff upper lip method.
There are no real rights or wrongs, it is very much individual. But a dose of sensitivity is always a good idea.
Then there are those who deal with trauma and tragedy every day. There is a tricky line between being too involved and not being able to fulfill ones professional duties and being detached and clinical.

It's a bit like Fanda Eagles. Some days we explore the deep dark issues and others we have a spot of humour to get us through. Both are entirely appropriate in the right context and both useful to keep us somewhat sane.

Thanks Shary! I really like the circles! I wince, remembering specific times when I've dumped in the wrong direction. Me and my big mouth have made plenty of mistakes along the way, so I have no doubt I will make more in the future. I hope I can remember this concept and apply it, because it makes a lot of sense.

Bemused you are correct. We have gotten to know each other and are able to read each other and can be serious or humorous as fits.

One thing I try to never tell anyone is I understand if I have not been in the same situation. I have been on the other end when someone said they understood and had never been in the same situation. When we were caring for my mother in law with dementia in our home and some one said "O I understand" I wanted to scream they had never taken care of any one in their home except some normally sick kids.

One of the most bizzare instances of saying the wrong thing was when I was rushing a patient to another centre in the back of a 737. I had to give the patient an injection, which due to turbulence was not easy. The air hostess decided to assist by holding the patients hand and saying, "I saw someone who had what you have on TV last night and they were o.k., so you will be o.k." Given that the air hostess had no idea what was wrong with the patient, it was strange.
The other strange situation was when an air hostess realised she had a patient and medical escort on board and placing her hand on my knee told me that she was single and had her own house, then asked "you are a doctor aren't you?", to which I replied, "no I'm a nurse". The reply was "oh, they are o.k. too" and I didn't see her for the rest of the trip. Wonder what she was after?