Christian Chat

@Realness Yes i think it has a few positives to be brought up a believer, but it has a lot of negatives as well. For the truth i been taught supported and aided me all my life while the lies taught did me much harm. i think you were better of not having your mind polluted by religious lies by the sounds of it.

@heartathome @tyme @ENKELI @Appleblossom

Not feeling up to it today much. Nauseated and rather down. The down set in yesterday afternoon and is still going strong.

@heartathome Hearing you about being weary. Metoo. I was never really outspoken. Somehow the link between my frontal cortex and my mouth got sabotaged in childhood, teens, and young adulthood and as a parent. Probably the main reason I could stay on this forum was that it was in print, so I could let my fingers do the talking. Yes, they can go fast. I also deliberately decided I needed to lubricate my brain mouth connection and that was in my thoughts when I went back to doing all the choral stuff again. So I slowly got my mouth moving, and singing in heaps of languages before I could get to the point of making my own utterances. I am very weird. Call it aspie, schizy, shy, whatever. It did help and now I can talk a lot within therapy, but it is only 50 minutes, and my forays into the social worlds are recent and tricky with all the shame and blame and stigma, whether it be in my past, or in my present, etc etc. Anyway. I can talk verbally now. Mostly I would turn thoughts, ideas and values into actions and doing stuff, not so verbal. I kept things brief and to the point, and maybe did not connect well enough with people cos I never felt safe enough to share what was really going on for me. Still dont, but my beans are spilling a lot more these days, whether or not the people have proved their safety. It just hasnt been possible in my lifetime to be able to separate it all out to my benefit. Things tend to work better in print for me.

Hey @tyme not sure you realised how circumscribed my mouth was when I first joined. Hugs and Thanks.

I will meditate on that quote for a while.

I really like that it  includes the mountains, cos my journey was so dissociated that I needed to go through the Love of Creation and through studied of Earth Science to even survive as a human being. My head was relatively safe, and fortunately the natural world was also relatively safe, when my peopled world was not. I am aware of the problems of disasters, and flooding and bush fire etc. I dont mean to gloss over those aspects. @Shaz51 just sent me a flower pic and I love her dearly for that.

@ENKELI Hearing you about being triggered by general conversations and curiousity and sometimes upset about what is permitted and what is not, on here, and more and more in our general society. Though this is probably not the time for a big free speech debate. I have frequently mentioned that triggers are often within the context of individual people's sufferings and not just a few dangerous topics. The triggering can be extreme, and made even worse when it feels the speaker is legitimated, and the harms not recognised. Hugs. Sorry for that experience and the general feeling of unease in our bodies. I was teased a little for not looking good enough in many ways throughout my life, whether it was my shabby clothes, having a big nose, 4 eyes, or being too tall, or too big. I did put on weight, cos I buried myself in food, and had to cos I was busy with family of 5, but have slowly lost it over the last 20 years. I knew I could not obssess about it as it would do my head in. Do what you have to do but be kind to yourself and be patient.

@Realness @DownMoreThanUp

This is me playing pink pong footie with my cat. Go Australian sports! Sometimes. LOL. Sometimes I am heartily sick of our national obsession, and long for more music, literature and the arts. However, these days there are more of those, than when I was growing up, so I am lucky I guess, I had a bit both ways...

Take Care all

Do or BE the best you can. Thats all we can do.

love

apple

@Realness Thank you for your beautiful response. Yes, playing piano alone can be a communion with God.

Yes, hearing you about confidence and children and music shining through. Also about poor kids and their needs, in what can be a very elite field. HMMMMM. I definitely struggle with the elitism nowadays. My music style, was mostly work horse throughtout most of my life. I was asked to join a youth group and play the organ at about 13, and was thrown in at the deep end. (It also happened a lot with swimming, so not only metaphorical!). Then I was pressured to earn, was disabled, and no longer in the usual workforce so began teaching beginners and intermediate. Just had to do it. Whether or not my kids were little and around me. Yep would settle them with an activity while I taught. I think my son had some sense of his privacy not being respected cos we had families and kids through the house all his life.

These days, I am trying to get into my sensitivity with it, these days and do it more for me, but having profound sturggles with an overpriveleged, badly behaved psychiatrist in a group I am in. God does she trigger me. I know its not ALL her fault, but partly the degree I have witnessed and endured harms from her profession to my family, over 3 generations. So her attention seeking and micro and macro aggressions churn my blood. So not blooming easy. Yes, its one thing for psychiatrists to have all the power in the mental health system, but when they socialise. Hmmmm. They should not too casual throwing their weight around. She is not the only shrink I have known socially, but she is the most irritating. The others were fine. Maybe this is the challenge God has sent me. Doing me best, not to get disenheartened or completely withdraw.

I am going to do some Mozart and Early Music for a recorder workshop on the weekend (Mille Regretz by 2 composers) in a minute when I log off.

Keep enjoying your music. A profound beauty about piano is it is great for solitude and personal expression. Happy to talk about stuff you are playing whenever you like, if I know it.

I also struggle with chronic pain and a neck condition, so not fully professional any more. I needed to do something more social, and reduce my isolation, so started a new instrument (recorder) about 10 years ago.

Hey @DownMoreThanUp ,

Thank you for your feedback.

I hear your concerns around having a place to share parts of people's lives in truth, honesty and frankness.

Whilst truth, honesty and frankness is appreciated and encrouaged, we have a community of over 47,000 people who may be in a very vulnerable space, and therefore the forums are guided by Community Guidelines which members must adhere to if they wish to use the forums.

This includes members not posting specific details or detailed graphics.

I guess my question is, does adding specific details or 'gory' graphics add to the main message of what people want to share?

Personally speaking, I feel there are so many 'open' spaces out there online where you can share whatever you want, and in a way, I feel I want a 'protected space', away from all that.

However, feel free to add it to this space here: would sane consider these changes to the forums

The feedback will be collated and form part of a co-design for future improvements.

Thanks for replying. i do understand that ill people need protection, but in my books there is a difference between protection from harm to protecting people from REAL dangers, and REAL issues, we as mentally ill people, or those supporting them, face.

I understand @tyme 's position and I have always been very careful about graphic or extreme images or posts, although sometimes I know the realities of my personal experience are intense. My personal style is generally to down regulate and find the calm approach, but that sometimes does not do justice to the situation. I appreciate the need to have a protected space on the forums.

However, I also hear you loud and clear @DownMoreThanUp about an ethical duty of care NOT to gloss over dangers within the mental health system. If the forum were to completely muzzle me, I would leave, as I do see the forum as having a responsibility to also be real, and permit members to be authentic. However I really respect that it would not be an easy task to distinguish, all the different and potential triggers for all comers. Its just not possible, so I have also argued for some tolerance and resilience and back and forward discussion, which I have found the mods and people behind the scenes, mostly take great care with. So I hang around.

However I have been damaged by the harms witnessing the system for a very long time. For 35 years, I also had hope, my own education and training and hoped more money, research and training within the systems would improve things, but I am not seeing it in my personal life, in other MH fields or on this forum. a mechanistic biomedical model reigns supreme, there are a few who find real good therpists to work with. SO its important to try and strike some of these delicate balances. I generally dont complain about how I have been treated, as a lot has been acceptable. I have been recently misquoted, and I am not happy Jan, and utterly despairing and disgusted in some of the system errors (to put it briefly and bluntly).

[edited by moderator]

Hey @Appleblossom @DownMoreThanUp ,

What you are saying is very important. We value your thoughts about wanting to see change in the mental health system.

It would be good if you could share this in the Advocating for Change space. Here's the link: https://saneforums.org/t5/Advocating-for-change/bd-p/advocating-for-change

Hey @Appleblossom , I'm just going to email you re part of your post which would fit nicely into Adovating for Change. Open to hearing your thoughts.

@tyme Honestly if i believed my input about this would help, i certainly would put in a complain, but i'm not positive after years of the run around each time i have tried speaking the truth anywhere it would matter. Like has been so clearly demonstrate to me - time and again - there is no flexibility to any form of complain that would hit the nail on the head.

Sad but true.☹️

@Appleblossom So sad to hear you also had the run around by the system. Thank God both of us survived such treatments but i often mourn the ones who didn't.

So very frustrating that at 65 i still face the same issues suffering a mental illness i did in my 30s. i do not believe any longer that society really cares about the suffering of mentally ill people. For in my experiences a lot of the social/religious/juristic rules and laws ruling our contemporary world are ensuring mentally ill is suffered.

Blessings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q6uCrpzbPY&list=RD3Q6uCrpzbPY&start_radio=1

@DownMoreThanUp Yes, I have 3 premature deaths in my immediate family, partly due to system error. I do wish the current practitioners had more insight into the harms caused, and a little less social status and complacency. Its time to flip the script. Shall we say many are emotionally numbed with respect to the harms caused. Possibly even dissociated? Hmmm. Where does the pathology lie? Where is the paycheck? Are services paid for actually delivered, or is it just a veneer of business and the next nonsense referral? How are the medical hospital managers doing? The EDs are not fit for purpose, but they like the business. Have I been too even handed and fair minded? To be honestly trauma informed, requires commitment to the client to walk the journey to recovery, not adding co-morbidities, and failing to reflect on the lack or rapport developed, as in doing a bad job, but still getting paid for it, and not even getting a rap on the knuckles. Its ridiculous, I am turning into a crap rap artist, my prose is getting so compressed and I keep coming up with rhymes without trying. Trying to lighten things but still get message across.

I was not lazy, but diligent in many fields of paid and unpaid work. However, yes I was traumatised as a small child, even as I understated it and always knew very well many others were suffering, usually worse than I. No, I am just not that bad to have caused it all. Anyone with basic developmental understanding would understand and know that. It was just my socioeconomic reality. There is incompetence and corruption around us, sadly. Some people are getting rich.

I need to stop looking through rose coloured glasses. I will try and respond to your email @tyme but I am also very weary of the run around. Its to be expected for myself, I am used to it, a good little orphan Annie, but when I witness it for others. It is not good.

There are some people who advocate for reform, but there are also people who believe the system is so rotten, they are now calling themselves abolitionists, after stepping down from some NFP and govt. boards. Quite a few great Lived Experience people are stepping away from boards as they dont want to collude and be used as window dressing. eg Mary O Hagan.