Coping with Hardships

We have all heard the saying “Misery loves Company.”  I never thought about this saying much until entering the world of Special Needs and all the forums and networking groups I came apart of.  There are some days when life is just hard and you get angry and sad and the only thing you truly need is someone who completely understands so that you don’t feel so alone anymore.  Family and friends are always there but there are just those times when you want to shield those closest to you from seeing your pain.  The last thing you want is everyone thinking you are depressed and sad all the time because in reality you are not…you just have moments and these moments can some time’s happen in clusters.  When my son in admitted into the hospital and hooked up to monitors I hop onto my networking sites and read about other families experiences to gain a better control of my current situation.  It helps me to know that others were in my same position and now they are past it…and I will be too.  The same goes for our really elated happy days when my son might do something he hasn’t done in weeks or months.  When I am giggling and smiling I want be surrounded by others successes because it is like piling good onto the good and making mountains of happiness that lift my spirits and give me energy to actually do the things I have been putting on the back burners because I was too sad or exhausted to do them before. 

My life changes when we have a good period of time where the good outweighs the bad. It is during these times when I feel like I am living life again and not just trying to survive it.  As the time has passed since we were first given the news about our son I have found it easier and easier to hold onto the positive things.  This has only been the case because I have had to retrain my brain to think of the positive in any given situation instead of being consumed by the negative of the moment.  If my son has a negative reaction to a medication or therapy technique that may even send us to the emergency room I try to stay focused on the fact that we now know my son has a reaction to that and for the rest of his life we know what not to do or what to do if it happens again.  It is like being handed a piece to his life puzzle to let us know in detail what to expect.  We would have never got this puzzle piece had we not have had to experience that moment of fear or sadness.  We could have easily dwelled on the fact that we have another hospital wrist band to add to our collection and let it get the best of us.  We could have let it put us on edge and totally consume us and compromise our relationship with each other and those around us.  Or we could choose to accept it happened, learn how to cope with it, gain a new understanding about it, find the positive in it, and then move forward focusing on the fact that we are once again moving forward…a new day…a new moment.  

Couldn't the same be said for anyone who might be struggling to cope with a hardship?  Everyone has good and bad days and this post has nothing to do with being a parent of a special needs child, for that is only my personal experience I am sharing. Depression, anxiety, bereavement, and panic can alter who you are and the things you would be doing if your energy wasn't totally exhausted from these things. The purpose of this post is to share with you some personal as well as professional thoughts on how and why we each need to learn how to find new coping mechanisms to help us through this journey we call life.  Life is so much better having a true smile on our face rather than one hiding a deep sadness buried inside. 

I have a personal thought that there is nothing wrong with any feeling anyone has over anything.  “Feelings” are feelings plain and simple and nobody can control what they are feeling because it just happens without much warning.  "Emotion" on the other hand can be spun out of control depending on the many factors of any given day (what you may have had to eat or watched on tv or lack of sleep or pms to name a few.)  Do not label your day based on what your emotion is doing to your feeling because that is exactly what it is E-Motion (erratic motion in my view).  Your feelings on the other had are justifiable so if you are feeling sad let yourself feel sad but do not let the motion of your day spiral you downward to effect and take over other feelings you have during the same day over any other topic.  A sad moment will feel much worse if it happened right after you just got done watching a sad movie.  Same can be said of a happy moment after hearing your child giggle.  Any one person can feel multiple feelings in the same day.  We get carried away when we do not acknowledge this and think that if we feel happy we should stay happy or if we feel angry we should stay angry.  It’s not how it works I have learned.  You can feel pure devastation and pure happiness in the same hour.  You can cry during a happy song because it may have stirred up a memory, just as you can laugh during a tragic play because you find the plot to be amusing.You are human therefore you get to feel everything in life.  Accept the fact that you get to feel things and it is perfectly fine and normal.  Then choose to feel as much as you can in every moment and you will be surprised on how many positive feeling you experience, yet ignore, because your negative feelings get swept up in emotion and seem larger and all consuming.   

The Anatomy behind our Feelings 

I just attended a meeting where a psychiatrist taught all about depression and anxiety.  What I learned I found to be extremely beneficial to the situation that I have found myself to be in after learning I have a special needs child. There are many positive and up lifting moments in the life of the special needs but there are many that involve depressing and sad situations and circumstances as well.  What I found to be the most interesting fact is that bereavement is something entirely different than depression and was a whole new concept for me.  When a person is depressed or struggles from anxiety it has to be a long term occurrence to truly get a diagnosis.  It takes over many aspects of their life all at once and continues to do so for an extended period of time.  It is hard to go about the day doing even the most mundane of tasks.  Bereavement on the other hand is much like feeling depressed yet you are able to function at a slightly higher level and go about doing the things you have always done just with less energy or desire because you are hit with moments of sadness.  It’s a fine line that up until now I didn’t understand.  To admit to yourself that you are depressed makes some feel that much more depressed.  A clinical or self-diagnosis being stamped onto your psyche and restructuring the way you go about your day and live your life.  A word that to some comes with a heavy burden or bucket loads of guilt and shame.  What if I was to tell you that maybe you are not depressed.  Maybe what you are really experiencing is just the overwhelming feeling of loss mixed with an all-consuming feeling of responsibility (aka…Bereavement).  Does a change of word make you feel any different?  To many it doesn’t but to some it might.  Understanding the basic methodology and anatomy that makes up such a huge part of my everyday experiences actually helped me and maybe it might help you too.    

I learned that there are two contributing parts of the brain that play a balancing actin controlling how and what we are feeling, the frontal cortex of the brain as well as the Amygdala.  The frontal cortex is the area that controls such human processes as Attention, Concentration, Reasoning, Social Behavior, and Emotion Regulation.  The Amygdala controls Negative Emotion, Negative attention, Perception, Emotional Memory, and the Fight or Flight feeling.  When the frontal cortex is winning your brains balancing act you will feel like you might have a better control or understanding on the situation.  You will feel like you can think clearer and cope better with whatever situation or feeling you might be having.  When the Amygdala takes over you will experience surges of negative feelings like anger, frustration, confusion, or irritation.  My theory is that the frontal cortex is where your feeling might have come from but it is the emotion that lives in your Amygdala that will explain how you might react to your feeling on whatever situation you are facing.  

The Amygdala, like many other parts of the brain, is pliable and can learn to function certain ways based on continuous re-occurrence of the same signals or function. It was explained to me in my meeting that a dog has a very actively functioning Amygdala which is why they might bark at the mailman every day.  Their basic fight or flight senses are intensified because their Amygdala is functioning on a high level and winning the balancing act over their frontal cortex.   One week the dog might bark as soon as the mailman reaches your door but after some conditioning he might only need to hear the sound of the mail man’s truck coming down the street to activate a response.  The Amygdala can be conditioned to react to a situation or stimulated to always react to a situation based on re-occurrence.  This is also known as “Kindling,” a brain training itself to behave in a way it was conditioned to do so.  A human can also learn to train themselves to react to certain situations as well and might explain why one person might find sadness in a piece of art where another finds beauty and light.  If you were taught to love the sports team your family loves and grow up in an environment consumed with that one team then it will take a lot of conditioning to rewire the way you think about that team.  The brain is a muscle just like any other muscle in your body where it can be worked on to grow stronger or it can be forgot about and gets weaker with time.  It might take lots of hard work to form new coping strategies but when you do you will find yourself to have a more positive outlook on something that once made you feel so low.  Rewiring your brain to think in a way it is not used to takes time but it can be done.  

Another contributing factor that controls the way these two parts of the brain function is family genetics.  One family’s genetic makeup might make them more prone to depression or anxiety based on the level of chemicals they have inherited.  Serotonin, Testosterone, and Progesterone to name only a few.  Your genetic makeup sets you up with a certain level of hormones that may make you more genetically prone to feel a certain way. Yet, by conditioning yourself to learn how to cope to certain situations in a different (positive) way you can actually re-wire your brain so that whenever you find yourself in a similar negative situation you now have a new positive coping response.  As a child I was fearful of the night time.  To me nothing good came out of the night because I was conditioned by tv and stories about ghosts and burglars and aliens and kidnappers who seemed to all come out at night.  It wasn't until my mother sat me down and taught me about all the wonderful things that happen at night like owls and dreams and building my bodies energy to grow and soft beds and pajamas where I was able to rewire my brain to look at the night time in a more positive light. 

First trip in a shopping cart without his infant car seat.  12 months old.  21 pounds. 30 inches long.

Hugga Bebe Pillow

Currently, one of my main personal struggles with my son is that he is growing out of his infant car seat and about two months late into getting into a toddler car seat.  I have held off for so long because he struggles so severely with his hypotonia that he is unable to sit on his own still even at 14 months old.  Not being able to sit or hold his body up makes it nearly impossible to go grocery shopping or to a restaurant without an infant car seat to carry him in.  This transition has hit me hard and it took a while for me to find a way to cope.  I found myself getting teary eyed going down the cereal aisle and seeing a cute little baby sitting happily and easily on their own in the shopping cart.  All the while I was biting my bottom lip to focus my thoughts on the pain of my teeth sinking into my skin that having to deal with the pain of knowing that my child, though twice the age of this other baby, is still unable to do this.  It was heartbreaking and from that point on I refrained from going shopping or out to eat because I just couldn’t cope.  Then I realized that I couldn’t just put my life on hold.  I couldn’t stop doing the things that bring happiness to my life.  I had to find another solution, another way to cope and re-wire my brain into thinking more positive about this situation.  I simple Hugga Bebe’ pillow did the trick and now I am able to cart my son around supported by a few pieces of overly stuffed fabric strapped together by Velcro.  Not only that, I posted a picture of our latest grocery store experience on a social networking site to show others about our new found experience.  From that one simple post many other families who were in a the same exact situation have also purchased or made a similar type pillow which helped them cope with this same situation.  Two things helped me learn how to cope with my depressing situation.  One, finding a solution to my problem.  Two, helping others by openly sharing my situation and solution.  I learned to rewire my thoughts and feeling in regards to my situation and can now cope and move forward.

Clinically, there are two main methods in treating depression or anxiety, medication or psychotherapy.  Both, which I learned from my meeting, have roughly the same benefiting factors and success rates but combining the two is probably more effective.  However, the difference is that with medication you get a quicker response because it is a chemical that is leveling out your Amygdala responses right away.  This is a great source for those who need immediate response.  However, there is evidence supporting the fact that with mediation alone there is a higher rate of falling back into depression or dealing with anxiety, and in some cases can even become worse when coming off the medication.  Psychotherapy aka counseling is the other method which is also very effective but takes much longer to see results as this form helps you find new coping methods to situations and in time solidifies a new thinking process.  This method, though more time consuming, has a higher long term success rate and lessens the occurrence to fall back into old negative behaviors.   This method focuses on your frontal cortex and helps you find new reasoning and regulation methods.  

  

Identifying that you have too much going on and might be falling into a depression is a hard thing to do.  Having one or two days of pure sadness, guilt, remorse, buckets of tears and not wanting to get out of bed does not mean that you are depressed and should be running out to seek medical help.  This means that you are having a moment and are working through it.  There is a fine line in understanding where you are at in dealing with your hardships because when you find yourself in those kinds of moments you really cannot think clearly and everything is a fog (your frontal cortex is in a losing battle against your Amygdala).  For myself it dawned on me that I may not be clinically depressed at this time but I do have many really sad moments.  I have many things to be sad about because I am still bereaving the life I had hoped my son would have void of any medical diagnosis and hardships.  These are sad moments and it is okay to be sad in these moments I have learned.  When something hits you in the face like it did for me with shopping carts you have to take that moment to really be sad and then you have to learn a new way to cope with your situation to turn it around and make something positive out of it. Easier said than done but one day after you have found a way to cope with your situation, you will be able to look back at it as only a memory and an experience you grew from.    

It is when these moments turn into weeks, months, or years of struggle when a big problem might exist and you should think about seeking professional help.  There is nothing wrong with seeking help be it either friendly or professionally.  You will be surprised at the many available free resources are on the internet with different blogs, networking groups, and professional websites.  If you feel that a professional approach would benefit you more than please do not hesitate to contact someone.  You will feel so much better once you are able to learn how to cope with your current situation and feel free to move forward in your life.