Recovery and Wellness: Measuring Individual Differences

There are a lot of people investing a lot of energy in measuring individuals with recovery measures.  They say so and so is more recovered, and so and so is less recovered.  There are terms like "Advanced Recovery".  I believe this to be an error in judgement, because everyone has recovery skills and saying someone is more recovered than another just sounds silly.  Recovery is non-linear.  The person with a history of alcohol addition, is only one drink away from returning.   The person with a mental health condition may find themselves in the throws of trauma or a former state, through events that have nothing to do with recovery.  I firmly believe that we are beings that contain all that we need to be whole, something introduced to me recently.  I firmly believe what we should be measuring individuals on is not recovery, but actually wellness in its 8 dimensions: http://www.samhsa.gov/wellness-initiative/eight-dimensions-wellness.  We have a high degree of variance here and that is where the real telling outcomes lie.   There are wellness skills that people can learn and there are external factors that impact our wellness that we can work on.  The area seems rich and fruitful in measuring how effective programs actually are.  Wellness also goes right to the heart of the disparity that we are living in the middle of.  Statistics say we die 2 decades earlier than our peers, when we measure and try to impact wellness, we are at the heart of where true change must occur.  When we talk about wellness we are looking at a measure pivotal to all people and there is a sense of equality in that to me.  

Compassionate Ramblings

As I embark on a journey of self-discovery, I'm finding myself dipping into the past when I was hospitalized for the first time.  The whole world seemed like it was against me and I've chronicled this journey in my memoir- Falling Into Peaces.  As I am reaching new levels of self acceptance, I am reminded of how I felt them.  I felt that I was the victim of a crime and that the world was responding inappropriately to me, back in 2003.  I was so confused, I stopped eating even.  What would have been different if people had listened to my story of victimization and honored it.  How would I have received medication differently.  What if people had had the time to really listen.  I was there for a month or more, but it seemed I was hardly heard.  I had a friend tell me they felt their story  of being a victim of a crime would be less believable, if her diagnosis were bipolar disorder instead of PTSD.  I was flown back in memory to my hospitalization. How do we honor victims of crime and keep safety for all in the community?  I am a woman of many fears, they are like my children.  They cry to me to avoid this or that, and I helplessly listen.  I beginning to realize I'm not so helpless and that I can honor my fears with compassion by accepting them as survival skills.

I feel much freer to choose today, because I realize my fears are there to keep me safe.  I can choose to honor them.  I can also choose to unplug from them in love, when I don't need them anymore.  Some of the things that I am afraid of simply aren't around me and sometimes they really are.  Sometimes I want to take a risk that goes against my fears, like when I am assisting some like myself unplug from their fears.  So the further I travel down the road, I am realizing I carry my past with me into the future.  I don't live in the past, but it is part of me.  How do we honor all parts of a person in the hospital.  I feel like my fears were always the subject of medication until now.  How do we honor our human fears?  I've learned to love them, I wish that self-compassion were a part of the larger society, behavioral health and beyond.

Freedom in America?

We took a short cut.  We ended up traveling through miles and miles of national grasslands.  The view seemed never ending and with the exception of a few campers, we were alone.  It was as beautiful as it was frightening.  The thought that continues to circle in my head was who would respond to a psychiatric emergency here?  As we continued towards civilization I had no idea I was headed towards a crisis in the west.  We arrived at the pristine ranch and I proceeded to call in my psychiatric prescription that my pharmacy couldn't fill in time for my departure.  We visited Mt. Rushmore then the next day I called to see if my prescription was ready.  The news was not what I expected- my routine med of the last 4 years had been discontinued by the manufacturer.  The news sent panic through my body and I called my prescriber.  I waited for 6 hours at least, before I started to worry she was on vacation.  I called urgent care, because my need was urgent- I had nothing left of my atypical antipsychotic.  The answer: we don't prescribe psychiatric meds.  They recommended primary care.  I called a family practice.  The answer: we can't do anything without your records.  Their recommendation was to call my doctor.  I searched for psychiatric hospitals and federally qualified health centers, only to be paralyzed with fear that that wouldn't work.  I began to realize the extent that healthcare is not integrated at all.  Above all if a smart reasonably intelligent woman can't easily obtain an urgent prescription fill to avoid a crisis- we are have a huge disparity and larger crisis at hand in our nation.  What happened to parity laws?  As I gaze at national symbols of freedom, I wonder what happened to my right to pursue happiness?  I finally called my family practice doctor back home, they called in a prescription for me for the  generic drug with words of trepidation that it was a controlled substance.  As I return from a breathtakingly beautiful trip I am aware- something is wrong in America.

Charles B. Willis Spoke Truth

Charles B. Willis died yesterday, and his friendship healed a hole in my heart.  He's the first man I heard talk about the trauma of sexual abuse.  He's also my first close friend who was African American.  Some people don't want to recognize themselves as a person of color, but Charles was more than this to me.  What I'm trying to say is growing up there was always a hole in my heart around hearing extended family members use racial slurs.  I think that for much of my family, this barrier of language will keep me from ever really feeling close to them.  I also remember the first roses I ever received were from an Afrcan American male.  My mom told me that my father shouldn't find out.  I can still remember a family dinner party, where my drunken uncle reflected on the violence of a different generation.  The real piece about my family tree that killed a piece of my soul in 2011 was learning that a favorite family elder had travelled to Africa to fight in wars and work in diamond mines - what that meant hit me like a stone in 2011 and sent me to the hospital.  Charles' friendship healed for me the trauma of racism I experienced growing up, really all my friends of color do.  I admire Charles' willingness to talk about trauma in sharing his story, so I know sharing my truth about the trauma of sexual abuse, the trauma of being a human trafficking survivor, and the trauma of racism will set me free.  Love you Charles, now and forever.  

Erasing my past few days of journey...

Saying all I could, when I can't say quite what I want is why I am erasing 5 days of blogging.  I don't feel the need to blog about all this and if my blog meant something to you, well thats probably a reflection of something inside you.  I need to step way back.  I'm feeling better, all I can say is thank-God for my husband, son, friends, and anti-depressants.

Peace and love,
Carol

Self-Love vs. Shame

This Valentine's Day my focus is on self-love.  Shame is the tool perpetrators in our society. They create create acts of violence to shame the victim.  I refuse to be a victim any longer- I let shame go the moment I announced on my blog I was a human trafficking survivor.  Before I was worried what will my boss or my boss' boss say?  What will my husband say?  Then I stopped the moment I realized that that worry was shame- the very tool of the perpetrators in my past.  I realized I do not have anything to worry about at all- because if anybody has anything negative to say about naming the trauma, they are aligning themselves with the perpetrator.  I will not allow myself to be denied words of self-acceptance and self-love!  I will stand in my shoes and name the violence of the perpetrator- human trafficking.  Naming gives us an opportunity to do something about trauma.  Because I named this trauma I  was able to align myself with a whole group of human trafficking survivors by joining the National Survivor Network. What can one survivor do in the company of many- the sky is the limit.  Happy Valentine's Day to me!

The Pounding of My Heart....

Some may think that I didn't struggle for long, because I escaped so quickly.  What is not understood in that single story is that I have been trying to escape in my mind for 20 years.  They are in my thought, over my shoulder, and in the shadows of my mind.  I was not a hero, there was no grand exit just an escape to 20 years or so of silence.  My heart pounded as I fled China and it didn't stop till I found sanctuary in relationships of healing in peer support.  Healing surrounded by other fleeing something inside too.
My story of escape became surreal and in the crevices of my mind, always hiding from them inside.  Hiding my story until age 43, when I made a video on my trauma story that I never published.  Hearing the videographers exclaim I was a survivor of human trafficking changed something.  This gave a name for what happened to me.  Now that I have found a whole group of survivors, I hope that they will accept me.  My moments of captivity were so few compared to the suffering of others and compared to the suffering of the women I left behind to escape.
As I try to connect with a new group of peers.  I know one thing, peer support has always been there for me and always will be.  It is my career, my life, my connection to sanctuary.  Without this sanctuary, I wouldn't have my family today because I never would have been able to trust on this level.  May this new group of peers in my life only deepen my trust in the earth's people.