The Neck

Twelve hours into mom's visit this week I woke up with a really bad "crick" in my neck.   The whole neck space,  front and back,  from the head down well into the shoulder area.   Tight.  Painful.   Clenched.

Just being around her has a certain level of emotional toxicity for me.   My neck area is often where I have severe tension after I am around her for any amount of time.    Why the neck?   

I think what we're talking about here are issues around the throat chakra.   My throat chakra is very, very blocked.   I easily wear out my vocal cords from talking (drinking a fair amount of coffee probably doesn't help).   And my neck is almost always the first place for me to collect stress.

The reason is that I have not been able,  throughout my life,   to speak my truth.   This blog is a tremendous help in remedying this fact.   As a child raised by a single mom with bipolar I had to buy into a certain version of reality.   Her version of reality.   And often,  the version was deeply influenced by mental illness.   I bought into many of my mom's fantasies about what was what.   I believed them because there was no one else around to refute them or give me a different take on things.

It's only been in the past several years that I have seriously analyzed my mom's views on life and seen them in a different light.   I think that my mom is a very intelligent and perceptive person;  who has a serious mental illness;  and who is fundamentally very fearful.   Her views on life are deeply steeped in protective denial and her bipolar disorder. I believe she thinks that if the truth about many different aspects of her life came out that she would be unable to cope with being seen by others in the cold light of day.  She is very insecure.   To add a little spice to the mix,   her memory can at times be startlingly poor.

All of this I modeled as a child.   And well into adulthood I bought into quite a bit of her side of the story.   I bought into her fantasy.

Additionally,   because of our culture's stigma around mental illness I also was not able to talk to others about my mom's condition,   fantasy thinking,  mood swings,  etc etc.   If she had had Parkinsons disease it would have been something that the family and friends of the family could have talked about with me.   "That comes with tremors,  right?"  "What kind of medication does she take?"

But because she had a mental illness no one talked to me about any of it.  No one.  Any of it.  

Instead of getting support from others for a sick mom,   it was a topic that was taboo,  even shameful to bring up.   In my late teens and early twenties, when I did bring it up with my grandparents or aunt,  we would move into "hushed tones" and they would try to change the subject as soon as possible.   

So by the time I was 25 years old I had two forces slamming into my throat chakra 24/7:    first was my mom's fantasy thinking;   and second was the shame around her (and my dad's) mental illness.   The former was my truthful interface with my family; the latter my truthful interface with the world.   Both were compromised.

So as we pass through the Thanksgiving holiday…..

My wife's support.   Counseling.   Blogging.   NAMI.  Books that give me insight into the issues I'm working with.   These are parts of my life I am very thankful for.

Because they help me to speak my truth.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Symptoms part 6: Reckless or Ungrounded Behavior

In these past several posts I have been trying to look at my mom's illness on a symptom by symptom basis.   My purpose is to try to understand the effects of her illness on my emerging self back when I was a kid.   My mother was far and away my primary model.   Dad was completely out of the picture by the time I was six and there was no other person who was a regular, daily part of my life during the time I was growing up.

It seems to me that the personality of a person emerges in and is formed by one's family environment.   This fact is no less true for someone whose parents are mentally ill.    As I survey my behaviors and personality now at age forty one,  I can see plenty of things I like,  and other things that make me pretty uncomfortable.   It can be disconcerting to think that a personality trait that one values may be a direct reflection of  a mentally ill model.     And it's scary to think that my own behavior could,  at times,  be seen as "mentally ill".  

In spite of my discomfort I must look at this piece and try to make honest sense of it.

The next symptom from the DSM IV is the following:

"Excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (e.g., engaging in unrestrained buying spree, sexual indiscretions, or foolish business investments)"

My mom has often been an easy audience for people peddling ideas.    She quickly wants to sign on to something when there's hype around it.   She has jumped on many, many bandwagons and spent a lot of money in the process.   Because she's had the support of the family her financial habits have not had dire consequences.   

This has been both a blessing and a curse.   The obvious blessing is that she is not in financial meltdown due to her challenges in effectively managing money.   The  curse is that she hasn't reviewed the errors to see how she might have done things differently.     She does not acknowledge any of her mistakes and in the rare instance that I bring up something of this nature,  she quickly changes the subject.

For the most part mom has kept away from sexual indiscretions.   One exception when I was a kid was when she took me to a man's house who I never saw before or after.     When we got there he showed me to his garage where there were some pieces of wood,  hammer and nails (he was a builder).   Then he and mom went back into the house.   After I had built something with the wood I wanted to show my mom and he what I had done.   I came through the living room and onto the back deck where they were having sex.   I was shocked and stood back.   They did not become aware of me though I was only a few feet away.   I went back to the garage and waited for mom to return.   

   

I have never brought this up with her and I am guessing that she wouldn't remember it if I did.

She did seem to have a regular sex life when I was a kid.   I remember a number of boyfriends she had over the years who came over to spend the night.   They were pretty discreet compared to the episode mentioned above.   What stands out to me is how she told me when I was older how she forwent having relationships for many years "because she was focussed on parenting me."     That is a picture very much at odds with the one I hold.   

For me,   "retail therapy" has often been an outlet with negative consequences for my credit card bill.   My own buying behavior has never been "unrestrained" but it has been ungrounded for much of my life.    I have had the habit of buying things because it made me feel good to have an experience of material "abundance".     I am gradually coming out of this kind of psychological dependence on the act of buying.    Sexual indiscretions have been there for me too,  though not since I was in my early twenties.   

There have been a number of instances in my life where my thinking became ungrounded,  and I displayed manic-tinged fantasy-laden thoughts and reasoning.   Usually, but not always,   it was times when I was under stress.   I have been very fortunate that there have been people around me who have pointed out my behavior to me so that I could become aware of it.   If no one had it might be very difficult to change the behavior,  and the affects on my life of behaving that way would not be positive.

The way the manic pattern works has a similar basis each time it's happened.   Often it has to do with something I want to do but which is not really grounded in the "facts on the ground".  Once it was wanting to buy a house which was way out of my price range.   Another was a hiking trip in bear country.   Another was a relationship with a girlfriend.   In each case my recklessness was kept in check.   I am fortunate that the consequences of my own ungrounded behavior have not been more serious.   

Reflecting back on these experiences make me question my own thinking.   It seems to me that part of the reason I have few friends I keep in touch with is that I am ashamed of my occasional ungrounded thinking.   I don't want to be "found out".   

A big part of the reason for this blog is to root out my own shame.   I want to be able to see my own behavior clearly,  acknowledge the shortcomings both past and present,  and then forgive myself.

I'm not there yet.   But by talking about it I am steadily gaining ground.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly,  Ben

Symptoms part 5: Increase in goal-directed activity

The symptom I'm talking about this week is 

"Increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation."  

The first half of this sentence seems like one of those symptoms that sounds more like an attribute;  something we'd like to add to our behavior repertoire,  rather than a function of a disease process.   Isn't "goal-directed activity" a good thing?   I think this might be where a person is very focussed on a certain goal and does not notice other details of what's going on around them.    Like their kid,  perhaps....  

My mom has pretty much always been involved in goal-directed activity.   She always has projects she's working on and wants to share about.    Work was an extremely important part of her self image.  She identifies very strongly with her role in a professional job that she held for nine years,  during the time I was a child.      Looking back,  I think she was basically "ramped up" during the whole time she held her professional job.     A big challenge for me was that she was so focussed on the goals at work that she had very little left over for me.     Then the double-whammy of "lack of insight about her illness meant that she was not aware of there being a problem.    As long as I did not display symptoms of neglect,  any challenges I might be faced with were out of her consciousness.   And as I have said before,  I fastened my survival hopes on keeping stress OFF of her as much as possible.   I reduced my needs to about as low as they could have been.

My mom also has processing issues;  cognitive deficits apparently related to her illness which make certain things very difficult for her.    I've seem them come out in many different areas.     As far as I know she has never acknowledged any of these deficits,  at least not to me.      I think it is very likely that she used her natural intelligence and ability to "ramp up" to cover these deficits as much as she could in her job.   I believe that ultimately, however,  these deficits are what caused her to resign from her job when her supervisor let her know she was about to be fired.   She just couldn't cover them up over the long term.    The swings of of her bipolar plus the cognitive deficits just made the road for her much steeper than had she not suffered from the disease.

When I was eight years old mom decided that she was going to install a lawn and grow a large garden.   I was the person who was going to help her do it.    Rather than pay someone else to do these projects,   or just take on a piece of it,  she wanted to do it all.   If I wasn't "pulling my weight" she would become angry.    It was a tremendous amount of work and she was very focussed on getting it done.   This is how we spent many summer weekends when I was seven years old.   It's taken me years to feel at all interested in doing things around the garden.    

I remember being in tears several times as a child because she wanted me to shovel the snow off the driveway and when I had,   it wasn't good enough.   At times I had to get the ice-scraper and chip all the ice away down to the bare pavement.   Not because it was so necessary;   she was just focussed on having all of the driveway cleared and I was going to do it.    As far as I could tell I was the only kid on the block whose shoveling was held to this standard.

I naturally learned to keep my space clean and help out with the chores without being asked.   My not doing so would have brought the critical and agitated eye.

In my adult life I can "ramp up" just like my mom does.   It's happened several times in such a way that my wife gets a bit worried and  points it out.   She is concerned because it can lead to decisions being made that she is not as much a part of as she'd like.   I can "get a head of steam going"  and she finds it's hard to get herself understood in that context.   What happens is that there is a loss of steady process.   Thinking becomes more harried,  pressed for time,  less grounded.    "We have to do this NOW"   comes to the fore as the reasoned approach fades.   

The second part of this symptom,  "psychomotor agitation"   is not something I have seen a lot in my mom.   According to about.com 

"Psychomotor agitation is an increase in activity brought on by mental tension.

Symptoms may take the form of restlessness, pacing, tapping fingers or feet, abruptly starting and stopping tasks, meaninglessly moving objects around, and more. Psychomotor agitation is frequently, though not exclusively, associated with agitated depression."

I don't remember this as being a regular behavior for her.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly,  Ben