Dr. Wilson's book on Adrenal Fatigue tells the case of a woman who was finding it difficult to recover from it. This woman had "several energy suckers in her life, including her mother" and she felt guilty if she did not have regular contact with them. Sound familiar? His prescription was to eliminate contact with these energy suckers and to absolutely minimise contact with the mother. She was not to speak to her mother for more than three minutes at a time and only twice per week. He then goes on to say: "Although these energy suckers were not the major factors causing her adrenal fatigue, until they were removed, she was not able to recover".
I strongly disagree with his statement. I am convinced that "these energy suckers" WERE the MAJOR factors causing the AF.
A family I know have a son and a daughter in their late twenties, the son is an alcoholic and has been off work for depression for the last couple of years. The daughter is very overweight and is constantly yo-yo dieting, losing the weight and putting three times more on when she re-gains it. As far as the parents are concerned, the son's problems are his doing and the daughter has a weight problem because she has "celiac disease". I know three other people with celiac disease, and lo and behold, they all have emotionally unavailable fathers/husbands. The father in the family mentioned above is also emotionally unavailable. My father also was (and is) emotionally unavailable. My conclusion is that all these issues that are blamed as the problem, i.e. alcohol, obesity, depression, allergies, food intolerances, psoriasis, and constant fatigue, etc. are not the problem but a consequence of the root problem, which is: dealing with pathological people who either make your life misery or constantly withhold what they should be giving naturally. While I am willing to allow for the "correlation isn't always causation" principle and concede that maybe not all cases of those problems mentioned above are caused by difficult family relations, in all the cases I personally know of, I can find this common element. Maybe the issue is cloudy for the professionals because every person's body reacts differently, i.e. as in the case of the family mentioned above, perhaps if both children struggled with alcohol, the source of the problem would be more obvious. It is also a lot more work for a doctor to try to put all the factors together to get the real picture. In all the years since my brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, not once has any doctor asked to see any of the other family members. I guess it's a lot easier for them to deal with the symptoms that to try to get to the root of the problem...
Showing posts with label Adrenal Fatigue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adrenal Fatigue. Show all posts
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
Monday, 6 May 2013
The Cracked Vessel
While checking the link on Adrenal Fatigue that CZBZ put in her comment to the post On Supplements I came across this:
"Exposure to other people’s pathology (and the corresponding emotional, physical/sexual abuse) can, and often does, give other people stress disorders, including PTSD. Our psychological and emotional systems are simply not wired for long-term exposure to someone else’s abnormal psychology. Often the result is a conglomeration of ‘aftermath’ symptoms that include PTSD, which is described as ‘a normal reaction to an abnormal life event.’
"Exposure to other people’s pathology (and the corresponding emotional, physical/sexual abuse) can, and often does, give other people stress disorders, including PTSD. Our psychological and emotional systems are simply not wired for long-term exposure to someone else’s abnormal psychology. Often the result is a conglomeration of ‘aftermath’ symptoms that include PTSD, which is described as ‘a normal reaction to an abnormal life event.’
The profound and long-term effects of PTSD create what I refer to as a ‘cracked vessel.’ The fragmentation caused by the trauma creates a crack in the emotional defense system of the person. While treatment can ‘glue the crack back together’, and the vessel can once again function as a vessel, if pressure is applied to the crack, the vase will split apart again."
It shed light on why as soon as life gets too hectic or I am dealing with too many "arrows" at once, I crash. Badly. I lose all the energy in my body. I am unable to move. It's as if the body has "yanked" me out of life into a "repair workshop" and I am not allowed to move until the work is done. DH said to me yesterday that my problem is that I don't stop when I'm tired, and I had to agree. It makes sense that the inner compass in my body just takes the reigns and makes me stop whether I want it or not. One of the articles in the website discussed the need for people who have been through trauma to "live a gentler live". Can I live a "gentler life"? Looks like I'm going to have to learn how to. No point being so busy and then crashing so badly that you can't do anything for days.
On this last crash I was so drained I couldn't even write but I was able to sketch a little. I was going to attempt to do a sketch inspired by the painting in the post on The Cracked Vessel, and in Modigliani's style for CZBZ -whose profile is a painting of Modigliani- for sharing the link. So I had one go and it was ok, but I wasn't exactly what I wanted. Then I had another idea: to sketch Jeanne Hébuterne with her dress as a cracked vessel, and this is what came out:
Saturday, 27 April 2013
SALT and Other Food Issues
When I was finally able to pin down my lack of energy to Adrenal Fatigue, I was surprised to find out that the book on the subject recommended salt for people who had low blood pressure. Of course, when you think about it makes sense that if salt brings up people's high blood pressure the opposite would also be true. However, the standard advice on food it's that everybody should stay as clear of salt as possible. And this is the fundamental problem with the advice we get on food: the idea that one rule fits all. The other big problem that I see is that there is no evidence whatsoever for a lot of the recommendations that are made.
Case in point: A few years ago I was having coffee with some acquaintances and I mentioned that the day before I had cooked a Nigel Slater recipe: cod fried in butter with lemon and mash. The two women I was talking to, who are roughly about 15 years older, looked at me with shock and horror and said -in a lamenting and snooty british accent (Think Violet in Downton Abbey): "Oh, but we haven't touched butter in years... " I looked at them and I didn't have the heart to reply with the thought that crossed my mind: "Well... it looks like not having butter is not making any difference to your size..."
That was the beginning of my questioning any dietary advice given by "the food police" (like Nigel Slater calls them). What I couldn't get my head round was that: there they were, following all the "rules" of healthy eating and still being overweight and struggling to keep it down and there I was, paying not one bit of attention to any of those rules: eating what I liked and not exercising, and still being a dress size 6 (UK) (US size 2). It just didn't make any sense. Every single person I knew who was on a low-fat diet was overweight and every single thin person I knew didn't do low-fat . That couldn't be a coincidence. So, if what the medical profession was saying about low-fat food wasn't true, what else wasn't true? I started wondering about everything I knew about food and to investigate the matter further. In the end I came to the conclusion that most studies are flawed exactly for the reasons that Kitty explained in her comment on the previous post, that :
" The complexity of controlling variables for nutrition studies must make it almost impossible to get good data."
So if studies are not a reliable source of information, what else do we have? Well, I my case, I have the history of my family. Let's start with my grandparents who lived to their mid 80s and my grandmothers, who died at 94 and 97 respectively. And here is the thing: in the village where my paternal parents are from, according to the dietary advice we get: they should all be dead. The amount of salt they put on their food is huge, well, put it this way: my aunt didn't just put a pinch of salt on the salad, she would chuck a whole fist full of salt. Their main meat was pork, which was preserved in olive oil in clay jars. Sometimes chicken and rabbit. Occasionally lamb. Wild hare, partridge and quail while the hunting season lasted. No fish or seafood, or very rarely, since they are about 400 miles from the sea. They grew potatoes and vegetables. They ate white bread with everything. Deep fried everything. (My paternal grandmother didn't even own an oven). They didn't walk a lot: this village is so small, it takes just over 5 minutes to get to the furthest end. But there they were, unknowingly disobeying every rule of modern eating and defiantly living to their hundreds. As far as I know everyone from that generation living in the village died of old, not of disease or cancer or heart attacks. And except for one widow, everybody was thin. The next generation (my parents' generation) are not doing so great, but what's different? they all yo-yo diet. They also all eat very fast.
Now let's have a look at the other set of grandparents. Their diet was quite different. Where they lived was not right by the seaside but was close enough to have all sorts of fish and seafood available. They also lived in a area of green pastures so they had beef, milk and butter available. Lots of different types of cheese too. Stews with chorizo, pork belly, potatoes and collard greens. My maternal grandparents didn't stay in that village for the whole of their lives (unlike the other set, who did), they moved to a big city in their 40s. So for those who think that it was the quiet village life that made the difference... nope. This city is so noisy that people who are born in it have hearing damage by the time they get to their twenties, and the pace of life is so fast that when one of my cousins (on my father's side) visited for the first time (she must have been about 12) she asked me why people were running! They weren't running, they were walking, (similar to the NY pace) but to her, our walking was running.
My parents diet is a combination of the two. My mother is a great believer of variety. They eat all types of fish and meats, plenty of vegetables, beans and pulses. Milk and yogurt. Lots of bread (my father will not eat a meal unless there's bread to go with it :P) Lots of fruit. Sounds healthy, doesn't it? Well, let me tell you that they are both very overweight, even though they don't eat sweets or cakes or biscuits of any kind. On the other hand they are strong as oxen and are never ill (nor were my grandparents ever ill for that matter); well, my father gets a permanent cold every winter when he has the flu vaccine (he never had colds before) but that's a whole other story...
So quite frankly, my conclusion is that a lot of the issues that are blamed on food (such as hypertension, cholesterol, allergies, etc) have nothing to do with food. Weight gain is a lot more complex than the press makes it out to be. For most of history, lack of food was the main reason that people got ill and died before old age. My bet is that most of the medical conditions that are blamed on food are actually a result of emotional distress (subject for a whole other post really).
Food does have a part to play in health, because what we eat becomes us, so to find good quality food it's important. The main thing is to have common sense. One rule does not fit all. People who live in cold countries need different food than people living in hot countries. I see people in the UK who diet during winter and get continuous colds, and in the worse cases, chest infections and bronchitis. It makes sense to eat cooling foods -like cucumber- when the weather is hot, and soups and stews when it's cold outside. A lot of the time our bodies tell us what we need, if we listen carefully. If something doesn't taste good to you, it's probably not good for you. That goes for salt too. Your taste should tell you how much you need. Like Kitty, I don't like the taste of table salt, so I have sea salt. (Jessie asked what salt extracted by traditional methods was. I found a video of traditional saltmaking in Hawaii, which is pretty much the same as the traditional methods in Europe.)
Case in point: A few years ago I was having coffee with some acquaintances and I mentioned that the day before I had cooked a Nigel Slater recipe: cod fried in butter with lemon and mash. The two women I was talking to, who are roughly about 15 years older, looked at me with shock and horror and said -in a lamenting and snooty british accent (Think Violet in Downton Abbey): "Oh, but we haven't touched butter in years... " I looked at them and I didn't have the heart to reply with the thought that crossed my mind: "Well... it looks like not having butter is not making any difference to your size..."
That was the beginning of my questioning any dietary advice given by "the food police" (like Nigel Slater calls them). What I couldn't get my head round was that: there they were, following all the "rules" of healthy eating and still being overweight and struggling to keep it down and there I was, paying not one bit of attention to any of those rules: eating what I liked and not exercising, and still being a dress size 6 (UK) (US size 2). It just didn't make any sense. Every single person I knew who was on a low-fat diet was overweight and every single thin person I knew didn't do low-fat . That couldn't be a coincidence. So, if what the medical profession was saying about low-fat food wasn't true, what else wasn't true? I started wondering about everything I knew about food and to investigate the matter further. In the end I came to the conclusion that most studies are flawed exactly for the reasons that Kitty explained in her comment on the previous post, that :
" The complexity of controlling variables for nutrition studies must make it almost impossible to get good data."
So if studies are not a reliable source of information, what else do we have? Well, I my case, I have the history of my family. Let's start with my grandparents who lived to their mid 80s and my grandmothers, who died at 94 and 97 respectively. And here is the thing: in the village where my paternal parents are from, according to the dietary advice we get: they should all be dead. The amount of salt they put on their food is huge, well, put it this way: my aunt didn't just put a pinch of salt on the salad, she would chuck a whole fist full of salt. Their main meat was pork, which was preserved in olive oil in clay jars. Sometimes chicken and rabbit. Occasionally lamb. Wild hare, partridge and quail while the hunting season lasted. No fish or seafood, or very rarely, since they are about 400 miles from the sea. They grew potatoes and vegetables. They ate white bread with everything. Deep fried everything. (My paternal grandmother didn't even own an oven). They didn't walk a lot: this village is so small, it takes just over 5 minutes to get to the furthest end. But there they were, unknowingly disobeying every rule of modern eating and defiantly living to their hundreds. As far as I know everyone from that generation living in the village died of old, not of disease or cancer or heart attacks. And except for one widow, everybody was thin. The next generation (my parents' generation) are not doing so great, but what's different? they all yo-yo diet. They also all eat very fast.
Now let's have a look at the other set of grandparents. Their diet was quite different. Where they lived was not right by the seaside but was close enough to have all sorts of fish and seafood available. They also lived in a area of green pastures so they had beef, milk and butter available. Lots of different types of cheese too. Stews with chorizo, pork belly, potatoes and collard greens. My maternal grandparents didn't stay in that village for the whole of their lives (unlike the other set, who did), they moved to a big city in their 40s. So for those who think that it was the quiet village life that made the difference... nope. This city is so noisy that people who are born in it have hearing damage by the time they get to their twenties, and the pace of life is so fast that when one of my cousins (on my father's side) visited for the first time (she must have been about 12) she asked me why people were running! They weren't running, they were walking, (similar to the NY pace) but to her, our walking was running.
My parents diet is a combination of the two. My mother is a great believer of variety. They eat all types of fish and meats, plenty of vegetables, beans and pulses. Milk and yogurt. Lots of bread (my father will not eat a meal unless there's bread to go with it :P) Lots of fruit. Sounds healthy, doesn't it? Well, let me tell you that they are both very overweight, even though they don't eat sweets or cakes or biscuits of any kind. On the other hand they are strong as oxen and are never ill (nor were my grandparents ever ill for that matter); well, my father gets a permanent cold every winter when he has the flu vaccine (he never had colds before) but that's a whole other story...
So quite frankly, my conclusion is that a lot of the issues that are blamed on food (such as hypertension, cholesterol, allergies, etc) have nothing to do with food. Weight gain is a lot more complex than the press makes it out to be. For most of history, lack of food was the main reason that people got ill and died before old age. My bet is that most of the medical conditions that are blamed on food are actually a result of emotional distress (subject for a whole other post really).
Food does have a part to play in health, because what we eat becomes us, so to find good quality food it's important. The main thing is to have common sense. One rule does not fit all. People who live in cold countries need different food than people living in hot countries. I see people in the UK who diet during winter and get continuous colds, and in the worse cases, chest infections and bronchitis. It makes sense to eat cooling foods -like cucumber- when the weather is hot, and soups and stews when it's cold outside. A lot of the time our bodies tell us what we need, if we listen carefully. If something doesn't taste good to you, it's probably not good for you. That goes for salt too. Your taste should tell you how much you need. Like Kitty, I don't like the taste of table salt, so I have sea salt. (Jessie asked what salt extracted by traditional methods was. I found a video of traditional saltmaking in Hawaii, which is pretty much the same as the traditional methods in Europe.)
While the press likes to go on about healthy foods and is continually praising the Mediterranean diet as the holy grail of health, the fact remains that most people have to make do with what's available where they live. Also, the Japanese and a number of other nations are just as healthy as people in Mediterranean countries, so I take the press' love affair with the Mediterranean diet with a pinch of salt (no pun intended).
In theory, if our diet is generally healthy we shouldn't need any extra supplements, but I have found that when I'm dealing with stressful situations, food doesn't seem to be enough. I'm not sure why this is. There is a line of thought in the UK that the soil is not as rich in minerals as it was decades ago. They say that to have the equivalent in the nutrition that a carrot had in the 1950s, you'd have to eat 7 carrots now. I have also read that some supermarkets irradiate fresh vegetables to give them a longer shelf life. I don't know if it's true, but I once had a bag of carrots in my fridge draw that was there for four months and still looked like I had bought it the day before whereas the carrots I buy from an organic supplier start shrinking within a couple of weeks if we don't eat them. So maybe there is something to it. Maybe if we're eating healthy, the food is enough to get us going in our daily routines (and to produce hair, skin and nails and all other regeneration and functions of the body that seem to be forgotten by the people who measure food just in terms of calories...) but not enough for when there is extra-stress. Maybe there aren't enough nutrients in modern food to be stored up as reserves. Obviously something has changed, because when you read what prisoners were surviving on in Nazi concentration camps while doing a whole day of physical work in the snow and still kept going, makes no sense at all that we have so much available food and yet, so many have no energy.
(If anyone has any theories on why this is, I'd be very interested to hear them.)
Thursday, 25 April 2013
On Supplements
In my previous post CS asked what supplements are most effective. So here is a list of the ones I have found made the most difference to me:
Vitamin C
Helps to counteract the effects of stress as is an antioxidant and an anti-inflammatory (good for those of us who suffer with allergies)
Magnesium Citrate with B6
Calms the nervous system.
Vitamin D
You need it to be able to absorb the magnesium properly.
Ashwagandha
The book "Adrenal Fatigue" by James L. Wilson has this to say on Ashwagandha:
"Because of its anti-inflammatory action, Ayurvedic physicians use it as the treatment of choice in rheumatic pains, inflammation of joints and other related conditions that commonly seen in states of Adrenal fatigue.
Ashwagandha is considered an adaptogen. An adaptogen is any substance that helps the body function more towards its normal level, for example if cortisol is too high, it lowers it, and if it is too low, it raises it. Studies have shown Ashwagandha is capable of normalising cortisol levels whether they are too high or too low."
Salt
A lot of us seem to suffer with low blood pressure. Unrefined or salt obtained by traditional methods (I avoid commercial salt like the plague, it tastes awful), helps to bring up you blood pressure. Also when we suffer with Adrenal Fatigue, we have too much potassium and not enough salt in our bodies; taking more salt helps to balance the levels.
Some side notes:
There is a lot of debate on supplements as to whether they actually work or not. My take is that synthetic vitamins (which are the ones normally sold at health stores) don't work because the body doesn't recognise them. Finding natural vitamins takes quite a bit of work and research, and they are also more expensive than synthetic ones I'm afraid. This also goes for essential oils, I had used oils before and they did not have the same effect as the ones I'm using now, which I get from a therapist and not from a shop.
Vitamin C
Helps to counteract the effects of stress as is an antioxidant and an anti-inflammatory (good for those of us who suffer with allergies)
Magnesium Citrate with B6
Calms the nervous system.
Vitamin D
You need it to be able to absorb the magnesium properly.
Ashwagandha
The book "Adrenal Fatigue" by James L. Wilson has this to say on Ashwagandha:
"Because of its anti-inflammatory action, Ayurvedic physicians use it as the treatment of choice in rheumatic pains, inflammation of joints and other related conditions that commonly seen in states of Adrenal fatigue.
Ashwagandha is considered an adaptogen. An adaptogen is any substance that helps the body function more towards its normal level, for example if cortisol is too high, it lowers it, and if it is too low, it raises it. Studies have shown Ashwagandha is capable of normalising cortisol levels whether they are too high or too low."
Salt
A lot of us seem to suffer with low blood pressure. Unrefined or salt obtained by traditional methods (I avoid commercial salt like the plague, it tastes awful), helps to bring up you blood pressure. Also when we suffer with Adrenal Fatigue, we have too much potassium and not enough salt in our bodies; taking more salt helps to balance the levels.
Some side notes:
There is a lot of debate on supplements as to whether they actually work or not. My take is that synthetic vitamins (which are the ones normally sold at health stores) don't work because the body doesn't recognise them. Finding natural vitamins takes quite a bit of work and research, and they are also more expensive than synthetic ones I'm afraid. This also goes for essential oils, I had used oils before and they did not have the same effect as the ones I'm using now, which I get from a therapist and not from a shop.
Saturday, 1 September 2012
The Core of the Matter
Another concept that really stuck with me when I read the book on Adrenal Fatigue was this:
"For more than seventy-five years we have known that the adrenal glands cannot heal from fatigue unless they have the opportunity to rest. Long periods of bed rest are not feasible for most people, nor are they usually necessary. The particular kind of rest you need when you have adrenal fatigue comes not so much from lying down, but from standing up for yourself, and from removing or minimizing the harmful stresses in your life."
I think this is where the core of the matter lies: To stand up for yourself. I can see now how that one thing would be the one that would make the most difference in my life. I didn't know how to do it though.
When I read that, I thought: "That's all very well, but how on earth do I do that?" I just simply didn't have a clue. If my FOO asked to come over to stay I didn't feel that I could say no even if it was inconvenient. If I was invited to a social event I felt I had to accept even if I didn't feel like it. I always felt like I couldn't say NO. It's like it didn't exist in my vocabulary. I only felt that I could say NO if I had a valid excuse, but to say a plain NO was just beyond my capabilities. I couldn't even imagine myself just saying NO.
I think this is the thing that kills me with a lot of self-help books: 1) a lot of the material is focused on what the problem is (which is kind of pointless, because we already know what the problem is, otherwise we wouldn't be reading the book in the first place) and 2) they tell you what to do but not how to do it.
So why was I unable to say NO? The short answer is because in my FOO saying NO was not an option. When I did start saying NO to one of my siblings, she turned into a gorgon (well, not quite literally, but you know what I mean). So I wonder if this inability of saying NO came from the deep down knowledge that the minute you said it, all hell would break loose. Come to think of it, I have no problem saying NO to my husband. So maybe it wasn't so much that I was not capable of saying NO but the fact that I knew the battle that would ensue if I did. The way things were going with this particular sibling was that I either stood up for myself or accepted a life of endless servitude. So I had to really improvise as I went along because there's no way I was going to be anyone's unpaid slave. Later on I did find some really helpful stuff which I wish had been available to me for when I was in the eye of the storm but to paraphrase my favourite french writer: "our destinies and our desires rarely play in unison." Still, better late than never. Some of these new found tools are proving really useful, because at the end of the day, there's plenty of narcissists to go around and even if you have cut or limited your association with the Ns in your FOO you might still have to deal with the ones that you might come across one way or another.
Standing up for yourself is like lifting weights, you have to build yourself up first. More on that in the next post.
"For more than seventy-five years we have known that the adrenal glands cannot heal from fatigue unless they have the opportunity to rest. Long periods of bed rest are not feasible for most people, nor are they usually necessary. The particular kind of rest you need when you have adrenal fatigue comes not so much from lying down, but from standing up for yourself, and from removing or minimizing the harmful stresses in your life."
I think this is where the core of the matter lies: To stand up for yourself. I can see now how that one thing would be the one that would make the most difference in my life. I didn't know how to do it though.
When I read that, I thought: "That's all very well, but how on earth do I do that?" I just simply didn't have a clue. If my FOO asked to come over to stay I didn't feel that I could say no even if it was inconvenient. If I was invited to a social event I felt I had to accept even if I didn't feel like it. I always felt like I couldn't say NO. It's like it didn't exist in my vocabulary. I only felt that I could say NO if I had a valid excuse, but to say a plain NO was just beyond my capabilities. I couldn't even imagine myself just saying NO.
I think this is the thing that kills me with a lot of self-help books: 1) a lot of the material is focused on what the problem is (which is kind of pointless, because we already know what the problem is, otherwise we wouldn't be reading the book in the first place) and 2) they tell you what to do but not how to do it.
So why was I unable to say NO? The short answer is because in my FOO saying NO was not an option. When I did start saying NO to one of my siblings, she turned into a gorgon (well, not quite literally, but you know what I mean). So I wonder if this inability of saying NO came from the deep down knowledge that the minute you said it, all hell would break loose. Come to think of it, I have no problem saying NO to my husband. So maybe it wasn't so much that I was not capable of saying NO but the fact that I knew the battle that would ensue if I did. The way things were going with this particular sibling was that I either stood up for myself or accepted a life of endless servitude. So I had to really improvise as I went along because there's no way I was going to be anyone's unpaid slave. Later on I did find some really helpful stuff which I wish had been available to me for when I was in the eye of the storm but to paraphrase my favourite french writer: "our destinies and our desires rarely play in unison." Still, better late than never. Some of these new found tools are proving really useful, because at the end of the day, there's plenty of narcissists to go around and even if you have cut or limited your association with the Ns in your FOO you might still have to deal with the ones that you might come across one way or another.
Standing up for yourself is like lifting weights, you have to build yourself up first. More on that in the next post.
Saturday, 25 August 2012
Adrenal Fatigue
Having a relationship with narcissists will drain your adrenals. It's as simple as that. When at last I realised that my adrenals weren't functioning as they should, I blamed it on the stress I had had for the three years before (I had moved three times) but now I don't think it was that at all. I think the stress was from being surrounded by people who just took and took and took, and eventually I had no (emotional) resources left. I was emotionally bankrupt and I didn't even know it. Having grown up in an Nfamily I didn't know any different. I didn't expect to have anything from other people but I always felt obligated to give to them. I can see now how this was a recipe for disaster. So in 1995 I had a really bad cold that wouldn't go away and after that I lost all the energy I had had before. In a book about adrenal fatigue it says that the cold or flu is what kind of catapults the adrenals to exhaustion but I think is the other way round: you get the really bad cold because your immune system and the adrenals are already exhausted and your defences are down.
Back then there was no information on tiredness, no internet, nowhere to find why I was feeling the way I did. So I kind of plodded along, trying to keep head above water as much as I could, met a guy and got married. Then I really crashed. While going out with my husband we had had a lot of grief from the people around us and I just didn't have the energy or the insight to deal with it all. It was all so stressful and in a way it felt like somebody else had the remote control of my life and I could see it being fast forwarded without being able to do anything about it. After we got married we seemed to have a whole lot of people come and stay with us: parents, siblings, relatives, friends, friends of friends. It never occurred to me at the time to say no, sorry, it's not convenient or I'm not feeling so great or whatever. This went on for some years, but one thing I had started to pick on is that some people seemed to drain me completely while others made me feel better and have more energy. I couldn't make head or tail of why this was happening. Nobody I spoke to seemed to know the answer either. I would have to wait to 2003 to read in a book about Adrenal Fatigue (by James L. Wilson) that yes, people CAN rob us of our energy and it DOES have a physical effect on us. Unfortunately, even though I felt highly validated that the whole thing wasn't in my mind, I was disappointed that there was not a lot of information about why this is the case. The book called them Energy Robbing People and it said:
"It is not necessary at the moment to explore the reasons why they deplete you but just to become aware of who drains your energy."
I strongly disagree with this statement, I think the reasons why they deplete you are paramount to your recovery. Because I wasn't getting to the bottom of this, it took me a long time to feel better. I did try to follow the advice in the book, but I found that while I now knew what was wrong and I was taking all the vitamins and looking after myself I only felt marginally better, maybe one or two notches up, which isn't that great really. But when I got to the bottom of it (i.e. discovering that my FOO was narcissistic) and learned tools to deal with people differently, my health and energy levels improved considerably. Even in the last few months since I started my other blog I have felt a whole lot better. Yes, I still crash every now and then but I rest for a day and I pick up whereas before it might have taken me one or two weeks of rest to decompress and recover.
However, to give credit where credit is due, there were two ideas in the book that really helped me:
"Patients often tell me that they feel guilty for minimizing their contact with friends or family members even when that person is robbing them of their energy. But it is important for you to realise that nobody has a right to your energy. Your energy is your energy to use to stay alive and healthy."
To hear that nobody had a right to my energy really helped, it's almost like I needed permission to cut ties with some of the draining people in my life and that sentence just let me off the hook. The thing with draining people is that they're absolute masters of making you feel sorry for them and then they use your pity to keep you in a vortex of obligation and guilt. That creates a sort of double bind because if you spend time with them they'll exhaust you and if you don't, you'll feel guilty which is an exhausting emotion too, so either way you're stuffed. If you're stuck in that kind of dynamic with someone in your life, your adrenals don't stand a chance:
"researchers have found that rendering an animal helpless is one of the most rapid ways to deplete its adrenals".
No kidding. Being stuck in unhealthy relationships in which there seems to be no hope of improvement and no way out is the surest way to deplete your adrenals.
Back then there was no information on tiredness, no internet, nowhere to find why I was feeling the way I did. So I kind of plodded along, trying to keep head above water as much as I could, met a guy and got married. Then I really crashed. While going out with my husband we had had a lot of grief from the people around us and I just didn't have the energy or the insight to deal with it all. It was all so stressful and in a way it felt like somebody else had the remote control of my life and I could see it being fast forwarded without being able to do anything about it. After we got married we seemed to have a whole lot of people come and stay with us: parents, siblings, relatives, friends, friends of friends. It never occurred to me at the time to say no, sorry, it's not convenient or I'm not feeling so great or whatever. This went on for some years, but one thing I had started to pick on is that some people seemed to drain me completely while others made me feel better and have more energy. I couldn't make head or tail of why this was happening. Nobody I spoke to seemed to know the answer either. I would have to wait to 2003 to read in a book about Adrenal Fatigue (by James L. Wilson) that yes, people CAN rob us of our energy and it DOES have a physical effect on us. Unfortunately, even though I felt highly validated that the whole thing wasn't in my mind, I was disappointed that there was not a lot of information about why this is the case. The book called them Energy Robbing People and it said:
"It is not necessary at the moment to explore the reasons why they deplete you but just to become aware of who drains your energy."
I strongly disagree with this statement, I think the reasons why they deplete you are paramount to your recovery. Because I wasn't getting to the bottom of this, it took me a long time to feel better. I did try to follow the advice in the book, but I found that while I now knew what was wrong and I was taking all the vitamins and looking after myself I only felt marginally better, maybe one or two notches up, which isn't that great really. But when I got to the bottom of it (i.e. discovering that my FOO was narcissistic) and learned tools to deal with people differently, my health and energy levels improved considerably. Even in the last few months since I started my other blog I have felt a whole lot better. Yes, I still crash every now and then but I rest for a day and I pick up whereas before it might have taken me one or two weeks of rest to decompress and recover.
However, to give credit where credit is due, there were two ideas in the book that really helped me:
"Patients often tell me that they feel guilty for minimizing their contact with friends or family members even when that person is robbing them of their energy. But it is important for you to realise that nobody has a right to your energy. Your energy is your energy to use to stay alive and healthy."
To hear that nobody had a right to my energy really helped, it's almost like I needed permission to cut ties with some of the draining people in my life and that sentence just let me off the hook. The thing with draining people is that they're absolute masters of making you feel sorry for them and then they use your pity to keep you in a vortex of obligation and guilt. That creates a sort of double bind because if you spend time with them they'll exhaust you and if you don't, you'll feel guilty which is an exhausting emotion too, so either way you're stuffed. If you're stuck in that kind of dynamic with someone in your life, your adrenals don't stand a chance:
"researchers have found that rendering an animal helpless is one of the most rapid ways to deplete its adrenals".
No kidding. Being stuck in unhealthy relationships in which there seems to be no hope of improvement and no way out is the surest way to deplete your adrenals.
Wednesday, 15 August 2012
About This Blog
During the last few years I have felt like I was looking at life through glass. I had started to see that there was another reality going on with my FOO and some other people I knew but it seemed that I was the only one that did. I wasn't exactly sure of what was going on but I sensed, that there had to be some sort of explanation for my experience. After much research I found the ACoN community. Now I wonder why didn't I find them earlier, but I guess it's all about asking the right questions, or in this case about googling the right questions. You kind of "have to name it to claim it" and you all know, that if you have been brought up in a narcissistic family, this is no small feat.
I already have another blog which I had to make it private just in case you-know-who found it. One of my blogger friends, Jessie, asked me recently if I would make it public again. I'm not sure I can, I want to be able to speak freely of some events that took place in my life which I am still trying to process and making it private gives me the freedom to give a lot more detail about it. However I do feel that once we know about narcissism we do have a sort of responsibility to share what we have learned and what has helped or not. After all, I would not have come this far without having read the blogs of others that have been here before me and have taken the time to share their knowledge. So while I will continue to post the more detailed stuff on my other blog, I am going to post everything that I have found that helped on this one.
I have chosen to name this blog after the Lewis Carroll book because of the chess analogy. I used to have a friend, a sort of mentor if you like, that I really admired at first: he looked like he had worked out what life was all about. He seemed to be a unusually emotionally healthy, no hang-ups, no depression, no guilt, a highly functioning kind of person. In my ignorance I thought that was the way to go. For years I tried to imitate him and learn from him, but I never seemed to make any progress. While in theory it should have worked, in practice it left me feeling empty. Unbeknownst to me I was in a game of one-upmanship and I was just a pawn in his chess board. I didn't know about narcissistic supply then. So I suppose you could say that between my FOO and some other "friends" I picked up along the way, I had built quite a catalog of narcissists. If you don't come from a dysfunctional family and have enough emotional resources I would imagine some of these people wouldn't have been a problem for you and you'd probably find them quite amusing if not entertaining, but when you're already carrying the burden of a narcissistic FOO the "extra" narcs in your life are no joke, because they take the last remaining bits of energy you may have for yourself that your FOO hadn't taken already. At one point I was "supplying" to so many narcs that no wonder I had no energy and felt ill most of the time. Not having a clue about the physical impact that people can have on you I used to blame it on stress, and it was only when I'd had enough of being tired all the time and started trying to find some answers that I found out about Adrenal Fatigue. Although the book I read about it did mention about "energy robbers" being a detriment to your health it never went into the reasons why that was so and rather focused on diet, exercise, etc. I suppose it would be a bit unfair to criticise the fact that it didn't go more into it and I understand that not everybody who suffers from adrenal fatigue may do so because of the people they hang out with, there might well be a number of reasons why other people get adrenal fatigue. I get that. It's just that, I believe now, that if I hadn't come to understand the impact of narcissism on my physical health, I would have spent the rest of my life in that vortex of blaming the symptoms and not the cause, and never really getting to the bottom of it and never really getting better. Around that time I saw a doctor who said to me: "If you don't change the way you live your life you're well on your way to get Chronic Fatigue or Fibromialgia." Actually, it wasn't the way I lived my life, it was the company I kept. I wish someone would have told me that.
I already have another blog which I had to make it private just in case you-know-who found it. One of my blogger friends, Jessie, asked me recently if I would make it public again. I'm not sure I can, I want to be able to speak freely of some events that took place in my life which I am still trying to process and making it private gives me the freedom to give a lot more detail about it. However I do feel that once we know about narcissism we do have a sort of responsibility to share what we have learned and what has helped or not. After all, I would not have come this far without having read the blogs of others that have been here before me and have taken the time to share their knowledge. So while I will continue to post the more detailed stuff on my other blog, I am going to post everything that I have found that helped on this one.
I have chosen to name this blog after the Lewis Carroll book because of the chess analogy. I used to have a friend, a sort of mentor if you like, that I really admired at first: he looked like he had worked out what life was all about. He seemed to be a unusually emotionally healthy, no hang-ups, no depression, no guilt, a highly functioning kind of person. In my ignorance I thought that was the way to go. For years I tried to imitate him and learn from him, but I never seemed to make any progress. While in theory it should have worked, in practice it left me feeling empty. Unbeknownst to me I was in a game of one-upmanship and I was just a pawn in his chess board. I didn't know about narcissistic supply then. So I suppose you could say that between my FOO and some other "friends" I picked up along the way, I had built quite a catalog of narcissists. If you don't come from a dysfunctional family and have enough emotional resources I would imagine some of these people wouldn't have been a problem for you and you'd probably find them quite amusing if not entertaining, but when you're already carrying the burden of a narcissistic FOO the "extra" narcs in your life are no joke, because they take the last remaining bits of energy you may have for yourself that your FOO hadn't taken already. At one point I was "supplying" to so many narcs that no wonder I had no energy and felt ill most of the time. Not having a clue about the physical impact that people can have on you I used to blame it on stress, and it was only when I'd had enough of being tired all the time and started trying to find some answers that I found out about Adrenal Fatigue. Although the book I read about it did mention about "energy robbers" being a detriment to your health it never went into the reasons why that was so and rather focused on diet, exercise, etc. I suppose it would be a bit unfair to criticise the fact that it didn't go more into it and I understand that not everybody who suffers from adrenal fatigue may do so because of the people they hang out with, there might well be a number of reasons why other people get adrenal fatigue. I get that. It's just that, I believe now, that if I hadn't come to understand the impact of narcissism on my physical health, I would have spent the rest of my life in that vortex of blaming the symptoms and not the cause, and never really getting to the bottom of it and never really getting better. Around that time I saw a doctor who said to me: "If you don't change the way you live your life you're well on your way to get Chronic Fatigue or Fibromialgia." Actually, it wasn't the way I lived my life, it was the company I kept. I wish someone would have told me that.
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