A question for all

Thank you for your reply. According to some reasearch most people find it difficult to seek help. It would therefore make a lot of sense to begin to provide better help online it is simply not helpful to think that helplines are what they are. This can often mean the difference between life and death for some people. I think that we should really look into providing better help and understanding that first contact is often the most important one. The Finnish people know this and if you look thee documentary titled Open Dialogue, link provided here, you will note how they provide immediate help to those who call. They get better results then us so it must work?

I see it as a result of societal displacement - heart and mind both "forgotten." So actually, a spiritual sort of psychological malady. [Society being a collective conscience, somewhere along the way]. Dopamine and other neurotransmitters, according to today's western scientific standard. According to my understanding, the only thing science doesn't fully reitterate is magic, be that shamanism or sorcery or the occult or whatever. I do believe half the answer lies there!

Hi @Appleblossom@theaveragejoe

I was interferred with by two teenage girls when I was about 3 - there is a photo of me at a family wedding and I look so innocent and my memory of the moment is watching the confetti and I remember picking some of it up and putting it in my pocket

And I was looked after by the mother of one of these girls who left me with both these girls and they did whatever with the confetti and told me not to tell my mother because she wouldn't believe me - and of course I had to and of course she didn't believe me and my dark recollection of that event is that my mother spanked me - and those spankings left bruises - and told me what a dirty little girl I was - and I was shattered -

But I don't think I was ever left there to be cared for again -

Over and over I was betrayed by my own mother - and I know we can't measure how these things affect us because we are all different and the circumstances are all different - so my mother's betrayal was simply added to that evening and I am mentioning this because I heard something on TV about What children needed to be taught what is inappropriate and like women of my age I was never taught that - how many of us were told this if we belonged to an early generation?

What does that leave us with? Someone mentioned the word relisience - and I was not destroyed by what happened and maybe positive events with my father and my grandparents were greater than the shoddy behaviour of my mother

I read a lot here about how the way our mother's treat us and how it is often negative. I have two friends from Eastern Europe who were brought up as second class citizens because they were girls - I found my life lacked choices because I was a girl - and in his later years my father realised that taking me out of school was a mistake - and it was because I was a girl

No wonder so many women lack the resilience I think I have - I believe I have it. Most events in my past have been filed away as dealt with but still - I have to remember that my mother behaved with her own loss and sorrow - the bitterness of her mother and other things

So the question has something to do with the labels we have - and I have extrapolated a bit here but I think it's true that no baby is born depressed and I know there are men who have suffered a great deal in life - but it seems to me to be common that women have low self-esteem and find it hard to get past the trauma of earlier years

I think about this a lot - the second class citizens being mostly female and the resiience I seem to have and some do not and wonder a lot about the extended family - I was loved by many people and that is I think the key to my resilence

LIfe can be so rough though - I do care about people haunted by childhood memories and think a lot about how some people can deal with it and others cannot

And for me I have had bad times - not at all easy lately - but I remember spending time with my grandparents and my young uncles when I was a child and these people could be trusted - I was lucky that only my mother was the hard case with the hard hands that bruised little legs and bottoms

I might just be rattling late at night but I find this subject interesting

Dec

@theaveragejoe I hope and your wife are well. It seems silly that the helplines do not offer a signifcant level of care and she needs to go to the emergency.

It was good to see an Aussie doing it well in New York. Daniel Mackler's reasons for quitting therapy are sound to me. I believe the American MH system is much worse than here in Australia, but we can always strive towards doing better.

@Owlunar Labels and gender, that is opening a can of worms.

@Sophia1 @olyris

Hi @Appleblossom

Vulnerablity - I don't think I addressed this part of what had been written in an earlier post

All small children are vulnerable and they have no way of assessing the terrible injustice of parental rejection, ill-treatment, the inconsistancies and the confusion of inconsistencies - and I have found in my adult life there are spaces in my childhood where I have memories but they are confused and I can make no sense of a time-line

As I am working through my past - let's hope my next therapist if I continue doesn't want to pick around in my memories and making them inflamed - AND how often I am asked why my mother and/or my sister DID what they did and SAID what they said and WHY they behaved that way and I feel like screaming HOW THE HELL COULD I KNOW? -

But vulnerable - yes - however - I have thoughts about my place in the family as the first grandchild on both sides and a girl in a male heavy family on Dad's side - I was wanted and loved and my grandparents and uncles filled the space left by my mother - I saw her as a very small person and physically she was - but the smallness was more like her meanness and I have forgiven her for what she could not help - I can see her reasons but no - I don't accept excuses

So - my summation is brief - it's resilience v, our vulnerablity - we do not come into the world as a tabula rasa - for many of us our fate is not written - we write it ourselves -

I hope this makes sense - it's very late but my days have been rough lately and it is so great that at night I feel the peace of my own life in my own home alone - I feel as if the wind storm and heavy rain are my friends -

Dec

Glad you have some sense of peace, @Owlunar but yes sometimes even the storms outside are part of our acceptance and sense of including a bigger picture.

Thanks @Appleblossom

In the stress of my life atm I do find some peace at night - and maybe the storms keep the things that tire me away - I am in my own bubble and thinking about it I know that my early childhood had a lot of good people in it and this is something you didn't have - a lot of people did have

My son didn't have it - I try and imagine what adoption might feel like - growing in an unquiet womb for nine monthes - under a torn heart - then born into a world where the mother's heart beat disappears - from time to time someone comes in with a bottle - sometimes they have a bath - and the baby has no sense of the drama already surrounding its life

And in time - his case 2 weeks - two strangers appear and take him somewhere where there are more strangers and what does he know? It must be an unhappy start to life. A very vulnerable start

My daughter was in hospital for the best part of 4 weeks and came home to a family she already knew - and she was happy and sociable and very much ahead of most babies at 4 weeks - very happy - already smiling

I hear you and thanks - I wish I could parcel up some of the peace I have in the evening and pass it around - that would be great -

Dec

Dear @Owlunar, you are absolutely right, no one is born depressed and this is a "fact". You also speak of trauma endured as a child. Did you know that research in America does link childhood trauma to later development of mental disorder? They did a study. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/index.html

What is important for us, more aware people with mental disorders, those that read and study and like to be informed independently, is that the problem with Western ways of treating Mental Illness is based on a very serious error: and that is to look at symptoms as illness when the reality is that in many cases symptoms are indication of an origine that is often found in trauma, particularly childhood trauma as the ACE study of America shows.

Do mental health professional know these things? Well, of course most do but most close an eye and pretend not to know. In this environment of false understandings, cover ups and money as the most important concern how can we truly improve the condition of sufferers? I ask you ...

It is mostly because if we were to be honest we would have to admit that a great chunk of what we call "Mental Illness" is nothing more and nothing less than child abuse be it verbal, sexual, or physical. Then we have the problem with illicit drugs, yes drugs do cause mental disorders.

Yes we prefer to call all this an illness so that we can sell drugs to consumers. Drugs can be important and they can save lives, sometimes, but in our Western World we tend to overmedicate, medicate for the worng reason and see profits before people. Business as usual.

Resilience is not just something that is genetic it can be developed. Resilience can be built up in therapy and as we discuss things we become desensitised from the events. The more we discuss trauma with a professional, the more we reason through things and the more we become desensitised. But it is hard to start. Some people find it impossible to confront the trauma. Maybe we should spend our resources on finding way to help people with first therapies when they need to confront the trauma again. Not all people can do it but it is not impossible. Still Governments do offer 10 free visits per year to those that are poor, on welfare or on low income, but generally speaking we don't give enough importance to therapy. Music therapy is very powerful in helping people free bottled up emotions. I am a musician and I have studied some music therapy. It really helps but governments do not recognise it and do not sponsor it in Australia not to mention that music therapists charge a fortune and this is another problem. Therapy should be accessible not for an elitest group of people. I know principles of music therapy from doing some personal research. If anyone is interested in knowing a bit about music therapy, let me know I will post something informative.

Yes I think that science is beginning to understand that every part of the body may be able to think like the brain in the heart. How does the heart know what functions to perform when it is implanted in another body? Clearly the heart needs to have memories and to be intelligent! But also DNA can communicate over space and time such as in genetic memories and now scientists are discovering that DNA may be also a network that communicates wirelessly and this would explain psychic phenomena. We are stumping science today not freeing science to really tell us what may be going on. DNA communication and how DNA passes on memories and information is simply increadible.