mindfulness

  • Grounding through Pain

    Grounding through Pain

    I’m trying to use coping skills. The little dumb ones, like listening to music, especially during triggers and stress. Writing. You think this blog is cringe? Should see my paper journal. I use grounding when I dissociate – what can I feel? See? Hear? This involves a bit of mindfulness, and I am not always

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  • A Lack of Feeling

    A Lack of Feeling

    My feelings wheel is a guide to help me figure out what I’m feeling. Sometimes I just can’t tell. The feelings wheel is not giving me much guidance today. I cannot tell what I feel. Nothing, there is nothing. The mood stabilizer is likely making me flat and blank. I am having flashbacks and stare

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  • Voices in the Dark

    Voices in the Dark

    During IOP process hour yesterday morning, I was more forthcoming about my difficulty with depersonalization and dissociation. I go back in time to painful memories, past traumas, the things that give me PTSD and sometimes keep me up at night. I’ve tried to use the coping skills I’ve learned to get through it – grounding,

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  • Patient Waiting

    Patient Waiting

    I called back my new unit manager, Jana. She talked to me about the somewhat long process to get a reasonable accommodation, and that in the meantime, it was quite likely there would be patients in restraints and since they’re short staffed, I might be the only aide on the floor. That is the case

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  • Sleepless

    Sleepless

    From Sunday to Tuesday, I slept two hours. This was shocking to the group in IOP on Monday. Today I finally got some real sleep but only after a couple hours of laying there, my mind going a million miles an hour. I was so tired, sleepy even, working myself to exhaustion and intentionally staying

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  • Intensive Outpatient – Week 7, Wise Mind, Gratitude

    I can’t believe it, but I finished week seven of intensive outpatient DBT therapy today. The focus is mindfulness for the next few weeks, peppered with shorter concepts to bolster the much larger concept of mindfulness. Today that was gratitude and the “wise mind.” Our minds exist on spectrums. On one end is the strictly

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  • Intensive Outpatient – Week 7, Mindfulness

    I had to duck out of IOP early today – my lack of a need for sleep finally seemed to be catching up with me. I worked two extra shifts Friday and Saturday nights, trying to expend the energy in a productive manner, and only slept a few hours Sunday before coming back in for

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  • Hypomania, IOP assessment

    Hypomania, IOP assessment

    Trying to sum up the last few days is difficult. My mind has been all over the place, my energy high, my libido even higher. We closed out emotion regulation in IOP, the end of week six for me. Riley the therapist wanted to see me after. I’m at roughly the one-month mark and it

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  • Intensive Outpatient – Week 5, Attending to Relationships

    Emotion regulation continued – in DBT therapy, attending to relationships fosters improved emotion regulation. This relates to last week’s emotion regulation core concept – building positive experiences. The therapist talked about the two extremes – the dialectical opposites – in DBT. There’s being too open, no boundaries, and then the other end, rigid boundaries, isolationist

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  • Hypomania

    Hypomania

    Holy shit! I got so much done yesterday after IOP. I cleaned my whole apartment, made a giant pot of mashed potatoes, did my laundry, cleaned up part of my closet and got rid of a bunch of things to sell/donate. My energy load continued into the late afternoon, and after 4pm, I had officially

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