I feel like my issues are too complex to recover from

[Deleted member 39476]

I had a nightmare last night, during my nightmare a friend of mine recommended I take prazosin to help with nightmares. That was strange.

 

[Deleted member 8714]

@jameson sounds like a message from your subconscious especially if you go with the premise that certain dreams are all about ourselves. So that would mean your friend is an aspect of you, your inner wisdom?

 

[Sideways]

Could also be the intense anxiety, pushing meds as a way of insisting “I can’t do this”. But, you can.

Could also be the inner monster - someone telling you that you need medicating is sometimes that not particularly subtle “You’re really crazy” BS that insensitive or gaslighting people might say.

Dreams are a slipperly lil sucker.

 

[Deleted member 8714]

Dreams are a slippery lil sucker.

So true @Ragdoll Circus . Best to find out what your own nightmares/dreams mean for you. Mine are coded in such a way that I know when it's a message from the interior or memory or a warning of an impending catastrophe. It took me years to discover my coding system. The warning ones only came to light recently. Before that I didn't know that any nightmare which starts with an catastrophe means one is coming of a certain type. Along with that I had to accept that I've always been sensitive to my environment.

 

[Friday]

Chiming back in here. I don’t think anyone, struggling with a disorder or not, can say they are genuinely happy.

Wowza. Poor Dalai Lama.

I can say it. I’ve been genuinely happy. Many, many, many times. In countless ways. From deeply & profoundly to momentary effervescence. Pick a synonym, and I’ve felt it, done it, lived it, loved it. I’m not brain damaged, nor high, so I’m not happy all the time... everything is temporary. But from fleeting moments, to the foundation of years, I’ve been truly happy.

Besides, I don’t think happiness is a worthwhile or sustainable goal to begin with.

I’ll have to violently disagree with you here. :D To each their own, however

 

[Deleted member 39476]

Wowza. Poor Dalai Lama.

I can say it. I’ve been genuinely happy. Many, many, many times. In countles...

Yeah I'm going to side with you on this one, I would not be satisfied going through hell for 20 years and not coming out truly happy. I have faith that I can get it though

The dream is pretty innocent I think, I have a doctors appointment in 2 days and I have to keep reminding myself to ask for a script for the drug because I always forget, I think that just came up in my dream.

 

[mumstheword]

I can't say that I'm truly happy about everything in my life but I can say that, on the whole, I now like who I am. I have love in my life. I am creative, I've developed a modicum of wisdom. I laugh a lot. I experience enjoyment. I enjoy a shit tonne of humour, some of it very dark. I see things a lot more clearly than ever and that's a process I enjoy. I experience inner peace, regularly. I overcome my inner demons faster and more effectively. I recognize things for how they actually are (that sounds arrogant but I'm gonna go ahead and assert it anyway). Things in my life are far from perfect but I'm happy with my progress, on the whole.

 

[Deleted member 39476]

I can't say that I'm truly happy about everything in my life but I can say that, on the whole, I no...

I think I'll know when I've made real progress when my inner demons are successfully converted into just normal parts of self.

 

[Hojay]

Wowza. Poor Dalai Lama.

Yeah, I did phrase that like we're all just running around like miserable sacks of sh*t, didn't I? No, you're right, I've been genuinely happy too, deeply and sustainably. I should have put a finer point on the word "transitory." That happiness, like sadness, comes and goes, and that that's not only alright, it's normal and just part of being human. The Dalai Lama, for one, doesn't claim we're all miserable 24/7/365, but that suffering shouldn't be resisted as "bad" while happiness strived for as a sustainable status quo.

@jameson mentioned that he doesn't want to go through the work only to come out mediocrely happy in the end. I wanted to point out that to strive for deep happiness that is somehow exceptional and also intransient is a set up for disappointment. If he said that he merely wants to be able to feel and experience those moments and times of true joy when they come along, I'd be totally rooting for that. But it sounded more like he would be going through, say, 4 years of more therapy, feel good, then something happens to shake everything up, and he'd think the process wasn't/isn't worth it because he couldn't sustain a prolonged period of exceptional happiness. My point was that none of us can (and those who claimed they have, from gurus to self-help book authors, are wildly irresponsible to claim they know how to.)

I think this attitude (happiness AND sadness are transitory and that's normal) is a much better way in for therapy and recovery than to set the bar somewhere wholly unrealistic and believe we can somehow eradicate suffering.

 

[Friday]

I think this attitude (happiness AND sadness are transitory and that's normal) i

Very much agreed.

Also that the sustained badness of <insert f*cked up symptoms here> aren’t normal / that’s the point -or at least a driving force- of/for therapy. Remove the barriers to boundlessness. Then the only limiting factors are ourselves.

Like a badly healed broken leg. Needs to get rebroken & set & physio. Can’t run at all before that. Can barely walk. After all the painful hard work to fix it? We can run as much as we please. For some that will mean not at all. For some marathons. For the marathoners? They’ll have periods of time where they still can’t run -illness, injury, weather, commitments elsewhere- because that’s just life. But that’s different from not running because they don’t want to, and not running because their leg is all f*cked up. <<< All parralels break down eventually, this one isn’t perfect by a long shot, it’s mostly to illustrate what I meant by the above about removing barriers. >>> Can’t know how far you’ll be able to run if you never fix the gimpy leg to begin with.

 

[Deleted member 39476]

Very much agreed.

Also that the sustained badness of <insert f*cked up symptoms here> aren’t normal...

In this line of thought it seems like a lot of people's approach to recovery is "my legs are both broken so I will enter a wheel chair marathon." I want to actually have my health back, I don't want to be trying to tolerate and work around this stuff forever.

 

[Hojay]

Like a badly healed broken leg. Needs to get rebroken & set & physio.

Wow, hold on, your post just reminded me of something I read long ago and thought a lot about back then, but somehow completely forgot over time.

It was about an indigenous tribe in the Amazonian rainforest whose shaman would initiate his successor putting him in a dark hut and breaking every single one of his bones, one after the other. They would do this in a controlled and non-life threatening manner, and over a period of a few years, this future shaman would do nothing but lie in this hut, endure incredible pain, and learn what it means to suffer and heal. Beyond the idea of the metaphorical and actual enactment that broken bones heal stronger and will be harder to break in the future, their logic for this initiation rite was that it would 1. weed out the wrong choice of shaman quite quickly (if they quit, they weren't up for it,) and 2. that only someone who has both endured indescribable pain and the process of healing from it, will ever be wise enough to be a healer himself.

So anyway, your post reminded me of that story. I pondered it a lot way back when, not because it somehow gave my suffering some higher purpose, but some meaning to the process in and of itself.