What are your best tools for trusting your experience and reality?
Three years after my break, two years after being diagnosed bipolar, and about a year semi-stable on medication- I’m still learning to trust my experience and sense of reality and rationality.
What are your best coping mechanisms for trusting yourself?
Mine are:
-Knowing my marker behaviors. Behaviors that I specifically notice occur during or right before an episode.
-Silent, meditative art. I have a journal I keep, where I journal and create art with and around it.
-Recording on my phone and playing it back to myself when I’m hearing noises I’m scared are auditory hallucinations***
If you want to know more about these bullet points I made and my with them, and how they help me, here’s some extra info, I wanted to keep it brief up top!
-marker behaviors- for me they can be as simple as knowingly being hours late to something that I know I’m not avoiding for any reason, or as silly as listening to Mitski songs on repeat. It took me a long time and a lot of self-reflection to learn these. I think the Mitski one is really funny honestly and I joke about it a lot but it’s actually a super accurate tool.
-Silent, meditative art.- my journal is honestly the best idea a therapist has ever given me. As an artist, I write the raw emotions, and then I collage, or paint, or do really whatever my heart desires. Sometimes when they hurt too much, I rip the writing up or burn it, but then I always midge podge it back into my journal even if I’m going to paint right over it. These pieces aren’t pretty or good and they’re not for anyone to ever see. But I often find my clarity and my voice once the loud thoughts are dulled under paint, and answers in what I’ve found that I’ve created. THE MOST IMPORTANT PART is that you have a drawer, or a shoebox under your bed, something. When you need the thoughts gone, you shut the journal, put it where you can’t see it until you need it, and you ground. The emotion is there for you when you need it.
-recording on my phone- ***this one I’m sure is more helpful for me because I don’t experience them as often- I’m sure someone with worse hallucinations will have very different experience there. I’m sorry if this feels stupid or dismissive if your hallucinations are more intense than mine- please take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. If your experience is different though I would love to hear what works and doesn’t for you!
@corvidian
Thanks for sharing everything that works for you 💙🤗
For me it's listening to music.
Fresh air.
Walking helps me process.
Journalling.
Honesty.
And faith 🤗💙
Those are really helpful ones especially the phone recording and playing it back works really well.
Other things I do are not journaling in a way it is cause I'm trying to write a book about my experiences.
Also stick my hand through visual scenes to see those hallucinations cant be real (even though my mind sometimes even then tries to convince me otherwise haha)
Do things to release pressure like push ups or highknees in place.
Looking to a corner of a room and try to focus on that. Or the 5-4-3-2-1 method.
Or trying to distract my mind by art or music and trying to image another world of which I have more control of instead of the horror visions and voices to me.
@corvidian
I'm still learning. It's taken me 50 years to get to this point. I've been robbed of a lifetime and missed out on everything: relationships, career, partner, family. When I felt terrible I was incapacitated and ended up in hospitals where they abused and ignored me.
@corvidian
Thank you for explaining things so clearly. Your kindness and your desire to help others really comes through, and it’s very heartwarming.