Success stories: How did you get better?

Hi @89632523

I just wanted to stop by and welcome you to the forums. I'm glad that you've found this space to voice these questions and am interested to see how some of our community members will respond.

While I don't have my own similar lived experience, I have witnessed others who have been able to find their way out some really dark spaces. It's amazing to see this sort of recovery and it certainly is possible, but progress like this often isn't linear. There will be times when you're not able to see the progress you've made, or it might start to feel like you're moving backwards, but it's important to remember that 2 steps forward and 1 step back is still progress.

Again, I really look forward to hearing from some community members on this because I know many of them have amazing stories to tell.

Hey @89632523 welcome to the forum. I went through i really tough period earlier his year which made me work on some of the lifelong issues i've dealt with. While there is no way I'd would use the term 'fully recovered', I got myself in a place where I felt a lot more on top of things by, 1st, reaching out and talking to people (like here for example) and 2nd, trying to see the positives that had come from all these negatives I was dealing with, and had always dealt with.

For me those positives were that from what I was dealing with, and things I had dealt with all my life, it put me in a great position to use the knowledge I had gained from my experiences to help and support other people who were going through similar things. It gave me a new direction in life and helped me a lot and allowed me to start to work on a lot of issues that I had always previously just put up with.

Now i'm not saying you need to quit your job, and find something new, but just try to reframe things going on in your life into how those experiences may help you to heal and feel in a better place mentally.

Maybe for you, it may be looking at the fact you've dealt with your own issues for along time, had some real lows and fought back. That shows a lot of strength and resilience that you've developed. So maybe using that to help you focus on what you do well will help you to know that you can work you way out again should another one of those big lows occur.

I would also putting a safety plan in place, if you haven't already, to help you cope next time you feel unsafe.