Working on dissociative resources

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I’ve been working hard on more resources for people who experience dissociation and those who support us. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, and strangely enough instead of getting tired of it all I feel even more motivated and urgent about doing more.

Part of this is that between the group Bridges, and taking various support calls and emails, I am finding myself hearing confidential stories of people’s pain and distress. This is really making me aware just how great the need is on a very personal level. It’s very difficult when I so often encounter apathy about the lack of dissociation appropriate resources – the assumption is that very few people experience dissociation. Even if that were true, we still need support! Feeling like I’m one of the few people who knows how urgent the need is, is making me incredibly driven to do more. It’s taking a lot of effort to slow myself down and look after myself too.

One of the things that really helps me is the Dissociative Initiative, because then I’m not alone in my concerns and my passion to change things for the better. It really helps to have other people share this frustration and the dream. We met up again recently, and trialled for the first time using Skype to include an off-location member. I was thrilled with how well it worked, we can now explore using this technology to help rural people access Bridges! We planned the Afternoon Tea this Friday (see What’s On for details and a pdf invite – all welcome!), new resources we will have ready in time to launch at it, and some upcoming talks.

I’m doing a couple of talks about dissociation soon in Melbourne for the Voice hearer’s conference, and Cary and myself will giving a talk at Mifsa on March 28th. We’ve decided to deliver the talk we gave at TheMHS last year, as that venue was only open to people who could pay the fee, whereas this Forum will be free for everyone. So we’ll be sharing our personal Grounding Kits and explaining strategies we use to help manage dissociation!

We’re also talking about ways to develop some support for carers and family. We’ve noticed that some of the information and support we’re providing is for professionals who are inexperienced at supporting people who experience dissociation and looking for good resources and suggestions about how to help. So we’re thinking about ways to support the support people too. 🙂 One of the great results of this is that we can have a much greater impact by helping other people provide support, than what we can do only by ourselves.

One very big exciting development is a new blog! We run a mailing list for people who like to be kept updated with our newsletter and any news about Bridges, but as it’s getting bigger manually emailing everyone is becoming burdensome. We’ve thought of a few ways of managing this while keeping the list strictly confidential, and for the moment we’re going to try using a new blog and the ‘Follow by email’ option to manage the mailing list on our behalf. Every month when we upload a new Dissociation Link newsletter (see back issues on my Articles page), the blog will automatically send everyone on the mailing list an email about it, with no possibility of me accidentally giving one person’s details out to someone else. That thought makes me very happy!

I also like the idea of people being able to read about Bridges, check times and dates, download their own flyer or factsheets, and gather some real information about who we are and what we do before making contact. Some people are very anxious and I think not having to ask for this information would be helpful, especially if they’ve already asked but forgotten (common with dissociation) and feel too embarrassed to ask again. 🙂 Plus, it will give people interested in learning about the Dissociative Initiative the option not to have to wade through my personal blog full of art and poetry and pictures of cats etc. to find it. 🙂 So this week is going to be busy while I pull everything together ready for Friday. I’ll keep you posted and create links here when things are ready to go.

In the meantime, SmART training about how to do grant applications starts this week – get in quick if you were interested! I’m hoping this will come in handy for applying for support to self publish a booklet, and other projects of the DI (Dissociative Initiative). There’s a few other groups and resources I’ve heard about on my What’s On page too, so have a look, I update it regularly.

Charlie’s hanging in there

/ Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments

Here he is looking like a woolly sheep after his bath. All his test results came back surprisingly good – his liver and kidneys etc. are all working fine. The only possible glitch internally is a bit of a low thyroid, but it’s hard to tell if that is causing the current problems or being caused by them. He goes back to the vet for a check-up next week. In the meantime, the antibiotics seem to be clearing up his ear infection but it’s hard to tell if his eyes are improving at all. Still, he’s in pretty good spirits.

This is my little black genoa fig tree, one of my all time favourite varieties of fresh fig. I’ve been nursing it along ever since I bought it as a tiny cutting. This year it had one lovely fig on it.

So this morning, with great ceremony, I ate it. 
I took all of Saturday off, it was a hard week this one and I really needed some time off. By Thursday evening I was pretty run out and spent most of the evening crying and writing poetry. It’s nice to live alone and be able to do that without disturbing anyone. Sunday has loads of work to do in it, but Saturday was camp fire day! I washed dishes, mopped floors, set out chairs and table and plates, set the fire, washed Charlie’s eyes and face, and then spent most of the rest of the day lying by the fire, chatting with friends and eating chips and hot potatoes. I so needed that. I even snuck in 20 minutes or so of ink painting before people arrived, which I’ll show you another time, and wrapped it all up with some computer gaming. I think I might need to deliberately schedule one day a week off or I’m not going to be able to keep up with the pace of study and work. Saturday was good. My skin smells of wood smoke and I feel a little calmer inside.

Black humour

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

A sense of humour is one of the big keys that can help reduce traumatisation and increase resilience. Some survivors of trauma develop a very black sense of humour that can be incomprehensible to people on the outside, but is actually a really useful survival strategy. A number of years ago I was seeing a shrink who would be startled on occasion that I would come in, talk about something really dark and frightening, cry and get really emotionally intense about it, then when enough stress had been discharged, start cracking very black jokes about the situation. He advised me to hang on to my sense of humour and told me it would help get me through. He was right.

One of the things about crises I’ve noticed is they build momentum over time. There’s a sense of situations, problems and experiences all stacking up on top of one another until the whole situation is so huge and exhausting I can’t cope anymore. Humour is great because it can interrupt that process. Instead of being stuck on train tracks speeding downhill, watching the crash coming and being unable to stop it, humour can lift you off the tracks and take you sideways – somewhere else entirely. The problems are still there and the pain is still there, but you get a breather and a different perspective. Often humour in these situations is dark because that’s what you have to draw upon. The same things that hurt you can also be darkly funny in certain lights.

Obviously, this isn’t about humiliating someone else, and not everyone is comfortable with this kind of humour. There is a crowd who will get jokes about psychosis, catheters, and all the things that we also cry about on other occasions.

A few years ago I was in a really difficult place in my life. My housing was unsuitable and deeply stressful, my family had broken down, my mental health was crashing badly and one night I was really in trouble. I was self harming, feeling constantly suicidal, suffering severe insomnia and dissociation and pretty desperate. I’d had a frightening and exhausting day and it was about 3am. I hadn’t slept in a few days and I was becoming really scared about my state of mind. I sat on the floor and called Lifeline, hoping a friendly voice might help get me through the night without hurting myself.

Lifeline are really busy outside of business hours, because most people feel in crisis and need to call at the points when all their usual supports – doctors, clinics, friends – are asleep and unavailable. I always expect at least a 1/2 wait to get through if I call at this kind of hour.

I huddled against the wall, listening to the hold music on loop and jumping everytime it sounded like my call was being picked up, only to hear a recorded message about how busy they were. The suicidal feelings were increasing as I waited and I was trying to calm myself down and talk myself through them without much success. I felt trapped, exhausted, and totally overwhelmed.

Finally my call connected, the guy on the phone said hello, and then accidentally disconnected my call.

In the swirl of numbness and desperation I had a moment to decide which way to fall. It was like a see-saw balanced perfectly in the middle for just a second. I laughed. The sheer stupid ironic ‘Murphy’s Law’ nature of the whole situation made me laugh. I was going to laugh or I was going to self destruct, and laughing saved me. I shook my head in disbelief at my total inability to catch a break and gave up on getting any help that night. I crawled back into my bed and left it all as a problem for another day.

So, if you find a sense of humour helps – and sometimes the weirder or darker the better – make sure you keep reminders around you that sometimes life makes no sense and if your options are to be crushed by it or to laugh at it, it’s better to laugh. I keep Monty Python movies around, tack up comic strips I like, and have a few mates with a wild sense of humour who help to keep me from cracking up. There’s a time and a place for offloading and honesty and emotional expression too of course, but I find it also helps to laugh until your kidneys hurt from time to time. It might be the thing that gets you through.

Poem – Lost and Lonely

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
Lost and lonely
Confused by the world
People live and love and die
What does it all mean?
What to do with the time?
Why do we live such small lives?
And is anything else possible?

My teeth ache
My heels ache
My wrists ache
The deep burning pain
That is always with me
My hips like anchors
Of hot iron in my flesh.

I limp up a darkened hallway
To a cold bed
There is no lamp to light my way
All the world is shattered loneliness
And I see no place for me in it
I am lost
On dark tides swept out
To a black sea where no moon shines
The world is full of pain and I
Cannot bear it and I
Cannot blind myself to it.

I know so many don’t live here
In the dregs, cold and dark
But a cold wind blows through me
And their fires do not warm me
And their light does not reach me.

I’m cold, I’m so cold.

Building social support

/ Sarah K Reece / 9 Comments

Some of us find ourselves in a place where we are deeply isolated in our lives. This is sadly a common problem for many people with ongoing mental health problems. Social support is one of the factors that help to build our resilience – our ability to handle difficulties. Isolation has been a major problem for me most of my life, and in my opinion certainly contributed in a big way to the mental health problems I was suffering as a young child. There are many different things that can contribute to becoming isolated, which can change the kind of approach you may find most effective in overcoming it. In my case, some of the things behind my isolation were very simple ones – such as being a creative arty person in a small school with a strong sports focus. Others were compounding issues such as developing PTSD in my teens and finding my peer group weren’t able to support me – their withdrawal distinctly increased my symptoms and distress which only made me more different and awkward and therefore more isolated. This kind of spiral – the experience of mental illness and/or trauma makes you behave differently and need different things, which can lead to your social support withdrawing, which can make the illness and distress worse – is a common one for many people. In addition, withdrawal from social contact is a pretty common symptom in many mental illnesses, so your social network can fall apart or move on while you’re hunkered down in a burrow somewhere. When you start to feel better and look around, it’s a bit like Rip Van Winkle coming home to find the whole world changed and his children grown. But too, for a lot of us isolation is part of the landscape in which vulnerability to trauma and mental illness is then grown.

I’ve rebuilt my life on more than occasion only to have it all burn again, and I’ve learned a few things from mistakes I’ve made over the years. Maybe some of these will be helpful to you.

  1. Sometimes you have to leave. I could bend myself into pretzel shapes trying to make friends at school, but really what I needed is to look elsewhere. There’s a few reasons for this – one of which is that having been targeted by bullies, even students who liked me were afraid of also being bullied if they spent time with me. But that’s another story! It would have been better for me to have been home-schooled and looked for mates in after school drama classes and activities like that.
  2. Borrowing the social network of a friend or romantic interest. It’s nice to be invited out and have people to hang around with. But if things go pear shaped you’ll be left picking yourself up on your own. Some of the energy you’ve invested into those relationships could have been spent making mates of your own.
  3. Putting up with very unequal relationships. It can get tempting to take what you can get and accept some miserable relationships when it seems that nothing else is on offer. I don’t mean never care about anyone else, or don’t be kind to your elderly stroppy neighbour. I mean taking on someone and treating them like your best friend when that’s really not what they are. Confiding personal information that is later used for gossip, nursing them through heartbreak when they never show on your bad days, always paying for the night out when they could afford to shout it now and then.
  4. Expecting more of your mates than they’ve got. When I was a teenager dealing with PTSD my mates at the time freaked out and distanced themselves. That was really painful and unhelpful, but I do get that a bunch of 15 year olds really weren’t equipped or supported to know how to relate to me. They had no idea why I was so reactive and overloaded, and frankly if I’d been given good support from other adults they might have had a model to emulate. Most of us don’t have friends who are deeply educated and experienced in mental health and trauma sensitivity. They are going to get it wrong. (frankly, even if they have loads of information and experience they will still get it wrong! That’s just the nature of being human I’m afraid) I use a lovely quote by Barbara Kingsolver as my own guide:

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away

We all need contact with other people to maintain mental health. There may be different quantities for different people – some of us need more social contact than others. We also need a range of different kinds of relationships in our lives, from the barest acquaintances to the closest of kindred spirits. Sometimes we may be better at maintaining one kind of relationship than others. Some of us have a couple of really close mates but almost no one else in our lives. It doesn’t matter how awesome the friend is, you still need other layers in your life. Others of us maintain a healthy bunch of friends we see now and then, but never seem to find anyone really close. Some of us find ourselves in a pretty bleak space where we don’t really have anyone.

I started rebuilding my own networks from the outside in. That is, I started looking for acquaintances and people I might hang out with occasionally before I went looking for closer friends. There’s less being asked of someone at this level, so a lot more people will make great acquaintances. A few years back I started going to Mifsa (Mental Illness Fellowship of SA) looking for company. When I first walked in to the activity centre and looked around, I was really disappointed. No one else there seemed to be like me at all. Many of the other people openly asked what I was diagnosed with when they first met me, which I found really confronting. I was at the time very closeted about my mental illnesses and I refused to disclose. On one occasion another participant took this as a challenge and told me they’d be watching me to work out what I had! This wasn’t a great start and I stopped going.

Then it occurred to me that there could have been a whole stream of people like me, with my interests or similar experiences coming through the activity centre over the years – but until one of us stayed put we were never going to meet each other. So I decided to keep going anyway. It helped to have somewhere, however imperfect. Access to resources such as the internet, landline phone, cheap meals and food bank helped get me through some really tough times. And although I wasn’t close to most of the other people there, they were company, someone to play pool with or watch a movie with. Just that basic friendliness meet a need for me.

Sound Minds (Voice Hearers Group) was  a real turning point for me. Again, initially it was less than ideal. I was the only person there with a dissociative diagnosis, and at that time Mifsa had no books, fact sheets, experience or resources of any kind geared to dissociation. I had to explain myself a lot and I was very stressed and sensitive about my diagnosis. But I was accepted, and they let me come and be upset about my life without telling me I should look on the bright side. Out of this the Dissociative Initiative was born and now things are changing. Sound Minds was also originally geared towards education. The first time I went along and shared that I was lonely, the room went quiet. Several other people then shared that they were lonely too, and it was just something to get used to. I went home and decided that a room full of lonely people was daft. Gradually the group became more social, and now I have the whole bunch round to my place for a camp fire catch up regularly.

I’ve started to build networks through the mental health community by turning up to lots of events and being friendly and talking with other people. I’m starting to get to know people. I also want to make connections through different networks – which is part of the motivation for the mad amount of study I do in different areas. But I started much smaller – by looking in places where I had interests (such as art) or felt accepted despite challenges (walking into a building marked “Mental Illness Fellowship”).

I have also found online communities at times to be very supportive. Facebook helps keep me in touch with people I don’t get to see often or those I don’t know well enough to give my details to. Skype keeps me linked in to people a long way away. Some nights just being able to find someone else awake and have a quick chat even if about nothing personal has helped take the edge off. I’ve been part of online groups through Yahoo which helped me to understand a lot more about my mental health and have other people to talk to.

For relationships that have been intense and distant, as in the instance of some family members, I’ve read about relationships under stress and learned about boundaries, polarising, and other common issues. I’ve worked on lowering the intensity and reactivity in these relationships, resetting back to friendly acquaintance if I can and re-growing things gently. I’ve also done a lot of work on myself, accepting myself, learning assertiveness, better communication, and how to better contain the kinds of symptoms that cause me problems in my relationships – such as raw emotional intensity, impatience, ambivalence, emotional disconnection and preoccupation, irritability, and… you get the picture. I’ve had to do a lot of building a better relationship with myself instead of trying to resolve emotional pain through company. Having said that, I’ve been quite stunned at the incredible difference having some emotional and social support has made for me. A lot of that emotional reactivity and instability have settled by themselves. It is too damn hard to do this all by yourself.

I’ve had to let go of some relationships that were really important to me because they weren’t working and sometimes I am just too fragile to handle it. I’ve also had to learn how to accept a relationship that isn’t quite what I wanted or that changes over time. Sometimes you end up in a relationship where you are treating the other person as a best friend and they are treating you as an acquaintance – so you do a lot more nurturing and being involved then they do. It’s been a hard lesson to learn that sometimes if that’s the level of relationship they want or are comfortable with, that’s what it needs to be. Very close friends take time and energy to maintain, and there’s only room for so many in our lives sadly. Sometimes you think someone is awesome but so do a few other folks and they’ve already got their complement of close mates. It’s okay, keep looking, if you’re a good friend and you let things develop at a good gentle pace, you’ll make them.

Trip to the vet

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I hope you’re feeling better than my little dog Charlie is today!

I took him to the vet today and he came home sporting this terribly fashionable short collar. When I last had him at the vet I was told to return once his condition had started to improve for blood tests – there wasn’t much point in taking any when he was so terribly unwell with the infected feet etc. The vet also cautioned me that if his tears start to seem milky it may be an eye infection and I’d need to return. I’ve been concerned about his eyes and tears and giving them baths in warm salty water but over the weekend they seemed to get a lot worse so I took him into the vet today.

Gosh, I’m glad I did! It turns out he has ulcers on his eyes! You can’t see them unless you use a stain, apparently he’s probably scratched up his eyes bumping into things (as he’s blind now) and they’ve infected. So now he’s on drops, steroids, antibiotics, and a collar for a week to stop him scratching and clawing at his eyes. Poor little chappie.

His feet have completely healed, his skin is much better and he has dropped 2kg and is now in his ideal weight range which is fantastic. He certainly looks a lot better than when I first got him back in December. His heart condition is still pretty bad, his arthritis is severe, and despite twice daily drops I cannot get rid of his ear infections. Hopefully the new treatment will settle down all the inflammation and give him a chance to get on top of things. He also had various tests down that I will get the results for next week.

I am now painfully in debt and paying back money to cover things. Thankfully I’ve a good tinned and packaged food supply! The vets parting words are what every pensioner pet owner dreads to hear “I think we’ll be seeing rather a lot of you, Charlie”. Oh, I hope not!

On the lighter side of things – I was asked to secure a urine sample and bring it back in, fresh as possible please. So this afternoon saw me walking about the local park, wearing disposable gloves and holding a specimen jar, and optimistically trying to pretend this was perfectly normal. You know how when you’re trying to go for a good brisk walk the darn dog will lift his leg on every single bush, fence post, lamp light, street sign, and tree? Well, follow one with a specimen jar, leading him hopefully to every bush, fence post, lamp light, street sign and tree on the route and he will be completely uninterested in marking his territory. It took me 20 minutes to get 2ml which I hope is an acceptable sample size, and the outside of the container got wet too, so I ended up inverting the glove over it and tying a knot in the wrist to turn it into a handy bag then hotfooting it home. I handed that in to the vet before dashing off to my next appointment, I hope they appreciated it not leaving rings on the counter. 🙂

How to call Mental Health Crisis Services

/ Sarah K Reece / 7 Comments

Mental Health Triage is our Crisis service in SA, and whilst they have an incredibly important job, they can at times be difficult to interact with. Sometimes this is just determined by who you get on the other end of the phone and how bad a night they’ve had so far. I’ve had to call them as a carer or friend on a great many occasions, and I’ve learned a few strategies that seem to make things a bit easier for me. Your mileage may vary, but here’s my tips:

1. Have a clear goal in mind
Before you start the call, work out why you are calling them. I know this can be difficult when things are in crisis, but if you don’t know what you want, you’re not all that likely to get it. Are you updating them with important information? Do you need them to speak to the person you’re worried about? Are you hoping for a visit from their staff? Do you think the person urgently needs hospital? Do you need police support? Work this out before picking up the phone if you can.

2. Gather the person’s information
I can never remember everything I was going to say once I’m on the phone. Write down a list, and tick them off as you go. Having everything in the one spot means less fuss running to check the name of the current treating doctor, or what dosage of medications they’re on this week. The more chaos and change in the person’s life, the more important it is you take a few moments to check all your information. You may need to know the person’s

  • current diagnosis
  • medications
  • treating doctors/therapists
  • hospital ID numbers
  • full name
  • address
  • date of birth
  • phone number
  • dates of important events (eg. she was last in hospital on…, he stopped taking his medication on…)

You can still call if you don’t have these – eg. you’ve just stepped in to help a stranger in crisis on the train – but if you can put this information together first it will help smooth things.

3. Lay out the situation really clearly and simply
Mental Health Triage get millions of phone calls from desperate, incoherent, stressed out people. Assume for a moment they have no files whatsoever on your person, even if they do or should have. Give them the dot-point version (that you’ve already written down) of what’s going on and explain very, very clearly why you are concerned. For example:

I’m calling on behalf of my friend Lauren. She has schizophrenia and becomes suicidal when she is unwell. I’ve just discovered she stopped taking her antipsychotics on Tuesday, she’s not eaten in several days. She’s just phoned me very upset because she thinks her neighbours are trying to kill her. She is barricading her apartment.  I’m concerned that she is a danger to herself and unable to care for herself at the moment. Can you please speak with her or send someone to her apartment.

Don’t assume anything. Don’t assume that it’s obvious you would want the police to come, or that the person clearly needs hospital. Don’t assume that saying something like “He’s becoming very withdrawn and won’t speak to me” will ring the kind of alarm bells for them that it does for you. You need to tell them that the last time he did that, x happened. Tell them what you need and explain why.

4. Cry some place else
That sounds pretty harsh, but I’ve found that if I keep really clear in my mind that Mental Health Triage are a crisis response service, not a counselling one, I have an easier time in conversations with them. Very occasionally a lovely person will look out for you and let you talk for a moment about how you’re feeling and coping. But going in, I assume that they are not there to meet my emotional needs. I am as calm, clear, and professional as possible.

This doesn’t mean your emotional needs aren’t important! On the contrary they are extremely important and it’s best to take them to safer places they are more likely to get met. If you need to follow or precede a call to Mental Health Triage with one to Lifeline, a good friend, your Mum, whoever, then do it. But in all crises, there’s a time to cry and shake and feel things, and a time to call the police and clearly tell them your address – or whatever. Don’t get them mixed up if you can.

5. Recruit help
Sometimes in a developing crisis you have your hands so full with the person you don’t have the energy or time to make phone calls as well. If a couple of you can work as a team that can take a lot of the pressure off. I’ve done this quite a bit, someone sits with and calms down the person, someone else makes the important calls. Doing it all yourself is a recipe for burnout.

Also use this technique if for some reason Crisis Services aren’t taking you seriously. I’m sorry to say that as the carer/family/friend your experience and opinion often count for very little. If you are looking out for someone with high risk issues such as a person with Borderline Personality Disorder, there will be times when you really struggle to get the help that’s needed. Persistence is the key. Keep calling them, and get everyone else who’s worried to call them too. There are resources and supports out there, but unfortunately they tend to go to the squeaky wheels. Don’t suffer in silence, squeak as loud as you can. There’s a lot of decisions made that are more about personality than anything else – sometimes one staff member will block all access but if you call back in 6 hours the next will be on board. Sometimes you only get the service your person needs because they are fed up with dealing with the calls, and while that is awful it’s better than nothing.

6. Do without them wherever you can
Especially if your person if in chronic distress, try not to escalate a situation by jumping for Mental Health Triage every time they wobble. Look at the patterns – eg issues with medications etc. and expect more of the same. Try to take as much of it in your stride as you can. There isn’t a magic fix for these kinds of issues. As much as we told to ‘ask for help’, there is no quick way to take away emotional pain. A lot of the help and healing your person needs is probably not going to be found in the crisis services. They can hospitalise or medicate, but that’s about it really. Sometimes that’s life saving, and sometimes it’s just more running around only to have them back home in the same mess in a week, or two days, or 6 hours. It’s not always worth it.

Concentrate your energy whenever you can on the other supports – finding a good doctor, a therapist, social support, maintaining stable housing etc. Be aware of the limitations of crisis services and don’t get hooked on the idea they can offer a solution that they can’t.

7. Give them feedback when you can
Crisis services can be frankly a horrible place to work. Any kind of front-line work like this has a lot of people having the worst days of their lives, feeling totally overwhelmed and miserable. If you have a positive experience, be sure to let that person or the service know that what they’ve done has made a difference. Treat them with respect and dignity. We need to look after the good folks in these kinds of roles so they stay around and look after the next person. On the flipside, if you have a terrible experience and have the time/energy, make a complaint. Be clear about what you wanted and what you didn’t like. It won’t change the world, but it can be part of culture changes.

8. Maintain credibility
As a friend, family member, or carer, you may be quite surprised to find how little your opinion counts. This holds true in my experience, even if you have extensive experience and qualifications in mental health. That can be a shock. If Mental Health Triage or any other service decides that you are overly anxious/unreliable it will be next to impossible to get them to take you seriously. The heart-wrenching thing is that there is basically no accountability in mental health. If your person kills themselves after you spent days arguing they should be in hospital, it is extremely unlikely anyone will be held to account for it. Additionally, we are in a no-win situation where suicide is often considered to be proof the person was beyond assistance anyway. This means you are far more invested in the outcome then nearly anyone else you will speak to – often including the person you’re worried about.

It’s not unusual to find that one minute you are told your person is not unwell enough to be offered a service and the next to be told they are too unwell. You may also discover processes that make your person much more unwell and distressed such as turning them away from services and telling them “until they actually self harm (instead of thinking about it), or have active suicidal ideation (instead of ‘passive’ thoughts) they can’t receive help”. Many people in distress start self harming or planning suicide due to situations like this. Many also become aware that the services are actually harming them and refuse to engage anymore, even with the good useful ones. It’s a crazy-making process and there’s nothing wrong with you if this stresses you out terribly too – but be careful of letting them see the impact on you. It’s a normal response to cry and yell but in mental health and crisis services will be seen as a sign of you ‘not coping’ and being mentally unwell, and therefore unreliable as a reporter of whatever is going on.

You need to do whatever you can to retain what little credibility you have. That means working with the system and accepting it as it is, instead of being fooled by the packaging into thinking it’s going to adapt to you. The more you can mimic their behaviour and speak their language – detached, professional, calm, courteous – the better chance you have of being taken seriously. As much as you can, make them like you and want to help you. Don’t let them write you off as emotionally unbalanced when the stakes are this high.

9. Ignore useless advice
As a carer/friend/whatever, you will get a lot of contradictory, useless and unhelpful advice. The crisis services are really good at this in my experience. Boiled down most of the bad kind turns out to actually be something like this: “If you were less involved, no one would be ringing me about this difficult person and my job would be easier”.

I’ve had the bizarre experience of being told off by one staff member for being over-involved and not involved enough in someone’s care within the same conversation. If it can be made to be your fault somehow you will probably hear about it at some point. A lot of people who know nothing about you or your caree will tell you how to care for them and let you know they think you’re doing a pretty lousy job.

Others will laud you and invite you to collude with them in how awful the person you care about is, or offload their frustration or distress onto you. Not your job.

I’ve also had experiences of emotional blackmail from crisis services, including Mental Health Triage, for example being told “But what if someone else dies tonight because your (person) was in the last hospital bed?” Some people find it difficult to work in a service and acknowledge its limitations. When things fall apart that means it will turn out to be the person’s fault, or your fault. Expect this and learn to tune it out as much as possible when picking them up on it would only distract from your goal. Find somewhere safe to rage or cry about it later. Don’t take it on board or let people undermine you.

10. Maintain value

There’s often a conflict between your perception of the person’s value and that of the services. People do get written off in many different ways, “it’s just behavioural”, “they’re doing it for attention”, “he’s a hopeless case”. Most services are kindest to people in the first instance of crisis, in short term crisis, and to people who are from the most culturally valued backgrounds. If your person is marginalised in some way, and/or has been in crisis for awhile or more than once, then they are risk of being devalued. As this happens the services may refuse to engage them at all, and/or the ‘care’ they receive may actually be thinly veiled contempt. Some services have endemic problems with treating all people with mental health crises this way, for example both police and ambulance services have many wonderful compassionate individuals, but also many who are cruel and use abuse and neglect to harm people. Sometimes this is a lack of understanding/training/empathy. Sometime it is simply a form of victim blaming where limited resources and too many people in need are blamed on those perceived as undeserving/not really in need. Victim blaming is endemic in our culture around mental health and the crisis services are not immune. 

You may see issues such as stitching self harm wounds without anesthetic, cruel responses to distress such as isolation rooms and inappropriately high dose sedatives, needlessly rough handling, leaving people in wet/soiled clothes, deliberately choosing procedures the person finds frightening, not allocating a bed, losing personal belongings, and traumatic conversations. You may not even be aware many of these things are happening as people in crisis often find it difficult to communicate. There are many subtle ways someone can be punished if they have been perceived as ‘wasting precious health resources’.

Be sensitive to subtle signs your person is being devalued and fight back by humanising them. Dress them in good or formal clothes. Do their hair. Show photographs of their family or children. Find small ways to remind people of their job title or degrees or educational plans. Bring flowers when you visit, even if this is their 100th hospitalisation. If you can, complain about or directly confront any abuse or neglect you witness. (once in an ER I overheard staff laughing about my person while I used the public toilet) Emphasise their dignity. Make sure staff are aware you see this person as valued and you are plugged in. Having even one member of staff see your person as valued and not to blame for their suffering will help protect them.

11. Don’t let the system burn you out

If the circumstances are desperate, use every bit of leverage you have to get care. Once I was homeless along with the person I was caring for. They were in life threatening crisis and I had no resources to support them. Mental Health Triage were flatly refusing to offer any services and running us around by sending us to hospitals then losing the referrals and the case notes, forgetting we were waiting for a consult, and so on. When I complained about the situation I learned the team had assumed I had a “home with a husband and white picket fence and was just offloading family I didn’t want to care for onto the over stretched mental health system”. No one actually asked me, and these assumptions were putting us at great risk.

Once I managed to get someone in crisis admitted to hospital only by threatening to kill myself. (the logic of admitting someone to hospital on the basis of someone else talking about suicide is mind bending) Another time someone had spent over 12 hours in Emergency with open wounds, untreated and without food, water, or a bed. They finally stitched her up when I threatened to contact the local newspaper health reporter. Another time I refused to allow someone home so the hospital would be forced to admit them.

These are not things to consider lightly and they may cost you all the credibility you have built up. But while there is a lot of lip service to the idea that your needs count too, it is not uncommon for carers to pick up the tab for overtaxed services. Sometimes this is the best thing you can do – bring in meals they actually eat, make sure someone gives them a nicotine patch within the first 48 hours, correct the wrong med they are being given. But also, you mustn’t let them lean on you when it’s killing you both. It is not the person in distress’ fault the services are broken. Nor is it yours.

12. Be careful – Manage their anxiety

Sometimes the best crisis care is sitting in the backyard and throwing ice cubes at the fence, screaming in the car with the windows wound up, or 9 hour baths. For some people and in some places, crisis services can be not just traumatic but lethal. Police do kill people in crisis. You may be very low risk and find that hard to process, but it means think twice about how you navigate and advise in crisis especially someone else who is at high risk. 

Competent crisis intervention recognises that crisis is vulnerable, volatile, and sometimes beneficial. It is about connecting, validating, empathising, and de-escalating. It is profoundly human. If you want to watch competent fictional crisis intervention, checkout the series Flashpoint. This exists in our crisis services but it’s not across the board by any means, and is largely a result of informal people skills. Meaning that those who were already good at this make great paramedics, social workers, etc. And those who were already awful are rarely improved through their formal qualifications.

It’s hard to get inside the head of someone who makes things worse in a crisis or hurts someone already in so much pain. Sometimes you can understand the different perspectives better when you apply your own empathy – a nurse sick of being attacked is obviously going to be more focused on neutralising threat than emotionally connecting. A police officer who believes someone in psychosis is sick and needs treatment won’t stop to think about the process and if it’s trauma informed – getting that person into hospital quickly is their job, and it’s the person’s job to comply (in their mind). Sometimes crisis services are best not called, or called only when you have the capacity to influence, calm, and de-escalate them, too. 

***

Most of that isn’t fair at all. You’re already working hard to support the person, probably exhausted and scared out of your mind, and feeling all the intense feelings that crisis generates. Services like Mental Health Triage should get that and accommodate you and your needs too. I couldn’t agree more – and occasionally it may happen that way. But that’s not been the norm in my experience. Take good care of yourself, it’s phenomenally exhausting supporting someone in crisis.

If it all goes belly-up and you can’t follow a single one of these tips but you need them, call Mental Health Triage anyway.

If your person is dealing with anything longer term such as dissociation, multiplicity, an eating disorder, borderline personality disorder, PTSD or psychosis, you may not get any useful support from Mental Health Triage at all I’m sorry to say. The level of discrimination against dissociative and multiplicity conditions is extreme and many crisis staff consider them all faked for attention. Most crisis services won’t respond to eating disorders unless the person is in acute medical crisis and even then there’s a lack of training about what to be aware of. You may have some intense advocating to do and sometimes have to fit the services to your own approaches, such as using the ER to re-enforce that someone with an eating disorder must eat at home or they will be taken to hospital. The hospital may not be happy about their role in this process but they don’t have to be.

Your best route is to stay out of crisis as much as possible, and get good support staff on board. Finding ways to manage crisis without needing services can also protect you both. You may need to get private hospital cover and look for a psychiatrist with admitting rights instead of risking the public system.

It’s also important to be aware that the highest risk time for issues like suicide is often just after the sense of crisis has eased. Discharge from hospital for example, is a common time people are highly vulnerable, traumatised, and feeling very alone and exhausted. While this has been widely recognised for a long time, in most settings little has been done to address it. Sometimes not being able to access services is a twisted blessing in disguise.

Good luck, take care, and get some support.

Mental Health Triage in SA: 13 14 65
Lifeline: 13 11 14

Conflicting Needs

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

Feeling absolutely stuck is a pretty common experience for many of us with mental health challenges. Sometimes we feel stuck because nothing we’re trying is working. Sometimes the limitations brought about by chronic difficulties such as severe anxiety or dissociation can make us feel absolutely trapped. In some cases we feel stuck when we have more than one conflicting need. Feeling pulled strongly in very different directions, we’re under constant pressure we can’t seem to alleviate. Moving in any direction makes the pull from the opposite even worse. It’s a difficult place to be in.

Image courtesy of Adrian van Leen, rgbstock.com

People in chronic emotional pain and those who’ve been traumatized often struggle with these kinds of polarizations. There are many paired and opposing needs, that when felt strongly at the same time can immobilize us. It’s deeply frustrating and upsetting and can lead to a spiral of intense distress and chronic anxiety that makes it even more difficult to think clearly or communicate about. Some common examples are the need to talk about something and an equally strong need to keep it secret. A need for social contact and a need to be alone. A need to break out of the routine and a need to stay with the familiar.

Something I found helpful when this gives me trouble is to realise that paired contradictory needs are actually common to all people. Granted, most people don’t feel them quite so strongly at the same time, but all people need things like social contact and time alone at different times and in different amounts. Some of the child development frameworks (particularly the attachment ones) talk about two of the basic needs of growing children; a need to explore, experiment, try new things, and a need to be nurtured, to feel safe, to be bonded. Children routinely switch between these two needs, how much of either they need is determined by their temperament, the environment, parenting approach, and experiences.

Children who are frightened, stressed, or traumatized will often experience less interest in exploring, and a much stronger need for nurturing and safety. Sometimes they will ‘regress’ to an earlier level of development for a time, they might stop speaking or sleeping independently. Usually once the stress has passed that need to adventure will come back and they will regain those skills and set out to investigate their world again.

I found it very helpful to realise that not only are contradictory pairs of needs quite normal, but that both are equally important to meet. In fact, their contradictory nature is actually complementary – they balance each other out. If children didn’t feel a drive to explore and master, to taste, hold, throw, build, dig, investigate, and learn they wouldn’t grow up and develop into adults. If they didn’t feel a need for safety, security, familiarity, nurture and bonding they wouldn’t learn empathy, love, social connection and kindness. These needs balance each other out.

With that in mind I found myself looking at this stuck place in a different way. Instead of asking myself which need should be met, I started to look for ways to meet both of them. I know that it can feel completely impossible to do that! Sometimes one could be met in a small way, then a little of the other, then back to the first. Children run out to explore, then come back to check family are still there, then run off again. It’s absolutely fine to take turns. Part of the nature of those of us who are in chronic pain is to start to think in very absolute terms. It can be difficult to think in small steps – today I’ll go out to that art opening and see people, then this evening I’ll turn off my phone and stay in and read.

Sometimes it takes some really creative ideas to find ways to meet opposing needs. Sometimes the way the needs are framed makes it impossible, but if you can dig a little, you might find another way to look at them. For example – ‘I want to see a therapist/I don’t want to see a therapist’. They can perhaps be expressed as ‘I need some help/I need to stay safe’. Once you reframe them that way it starts to become possible to meet both – for example going to see a new therapist, but deciding not to talk about certain things until you get to know them and develop some trust. Promising yourself that you wont keep going if they are not safe, or that you will look for another therapist instead of opening up is one way of meeting both needs. Or deciding that for the moment, seeing a therapist would be too distressing, and deciding to use anonymous helplines on occasion, or read a book about your difficulties instead are other ways of meeting both needs; getting help and staying safe.

Once you start to move out of the either/or mindset and see both needs as important, you can start to unpick the knots that keep you feeling stuck and find a way to move forwards. Over time I’ve found that my brain has come to understand this approach and work with me much more. As long as I’m reliable about doing things like taking turns which need I’ll meet, the intense feelings start to settle down. It’s a little like having two dogs that can’t be walked together. At first when you take one out, the other barks and whines and makes a huge fuss. But if you’re reliable about taking the second one for a walk too, after a while the one left home trusts that you will come back for it and it settles down and lets you get on with things in peace.

People with parts can sometimes find that different needs are compartmentlised within different parts, which can set the scene for a lot of internal conflict. Treating all these needs as valid and valuable, and understanding that a lack of balance is the result when they get cut off from each other can make a big difference to restoring some calm and safety to warring multiple systems.

A final note – we can also get very stuck when one of a complementary set of needs is completely suppressed. If we only feel the need for safety and familiarity, and never the need to adventure our world can become very small. If we only feel the need to be social and never to be alone with our thoughts we can lose our chance to learn about and care for ourselves. Again, small steps towards the other need can be better than huge changes. Little moves in the other direction can help to unfreeze us and wake up that other need in us. We all naturally have a different balance of needs as part of our personality. Some people love comfortable holidays in five star hotels, others spend their free time white water rafting. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s part of the marvellous diversity that makes up the human race. But if you’re feeling unbalanced and stuck, it might help to spend some time with or read about people who exemplify the need you’ve lost touch with. Just a little love of home can stabilize chaotic wanderlust, just a little curiosity can inspire a recluse to try something new, just a little sharing can reconnect someone isolated by secrets.

 

Peer Work Cert & Radio Adelaide orientations

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
The Mental Health Peer Work Certificate IV has started! Orientation was a lot of Tafe policies and procedures, which I’ve sat through at AC Arts, and a new bag of goodies (rulers and suchlike) which curiously enough was significantly more packed than the one I got for Visual Arts… maybe because of the much smaller class size. There was a whole theatre full of new art students on Tuesday! It’s going to be good to get to know the other peer workers and learn about the kind of work they are doing or interested in.

Radio Adelaide had their induction on Thursday night, for the new intake of students. It was good, very thorough, fire policies, location of various staff, how to manage prizes given out on air… I think I may have retained about 20% of the information and I’ll need to read their mammoth book of instructions to try and absorb the rest…

The world of admin once again threatens to engulf me entirely… I have paperwork for Centrelink that I can’t finish and submit because the Tafe codes for courses haven’t been sorted out yet, the dentist had to put my appointment back to next week because the night guard wasn’t delivered to him yet, the ‘fitness to drive’ form needs filling in my GP again to maintain my license, someone has sent a report to the RSPCA about my pets I need to follow up and resolve – no details yet so I’ve no idea what the trouble is, Housing SA have had some difficulties with the automated process to debit my rent so I have to trundle down to a post office next week and pay some rent that’s now in arrears, I need to make new files for my various study areas to keep track of all the paperwork (the current system is a heap by my armchair hmmm)…

On the upside, Bridges and Sound Minds went well this week, Charlie and Loki are both slowly improving, Charlie is losing a little weight and loving all the walks, and Loki is putting some on. I’m excited about study, the Dissociative Initiative met briefly today and made some great plans for this year, a friend gave me half a dozen lovely free range eggs from her backyard hens (I had one for dinner – a double yolker! yum) and it’s finally the weekend! Phew! Art beckons… and less appealingly – some more unpacking.

DID Card

/ Sarah K Reece / 7 Comments
Recently someone gave me a few of these very interesting little cards. They are the size of business card, and use that minimum of space to share vital information about the nature of DID. In the event of a crisis I imagine they could be very helpful!

They also provide a link to a website in the UK – you can find it here. It’s quite comprehensive with a lot of information and resources. I would love to set up something like that here in Australia! I’m going to chat to the members of Bridges and the Dissociative Initiative about perhaps making up our own cards of information like these. One of the things I’d like to see is a second complementary card that discusses dissociation. Something that frustrates me a great deal is that in all the hype over multiplicity, those dealing with dissociation that presents in other ways – such as amnesia, depersonalisation, loss of senses etc. can be overlooked. Multiplicity is one manifestation of dissociation, but severe and chronic dissociation in any other areas can be equally distressing and disabling. I’ve been searching for books on dissociation but not multiplicity for Bridges (as the group offers support to people with either experience) and I’ve been quite frustrated at the appalling lack of information out there! The majority of the books in this field concentrate on either general trauma phenomenology, or multiplicity.

It’s been suggested to me that perhaps considering this gap in the literature, I should write such a book, and I admit I’m giving it serious thought. When to find the time is probably the biggest consideration. What to write, how to structure it, how much research I’d need to do to back up my opinions, and whether to wait until I have professional qualifications in the field for greater credibility are all on my mind. There’s a WEA class on writing non-fiction coming up that I think could help me think about structure, layout and organisation. Part of my concern is also how to make it affordable so those who most need it can access it – perhaps through a grant of some kind? Also, making it shorter, a booklet, may keep costs and therefore prices down. The beauty of this blog is it is free for me to host articles and suggestions, but the net is not accessible to everyone and there is something to be said for being able to underline, asterisks or cross out things in a book if you are so inclined. In rare quieter moments I’m finding myself starting to work out the introductory chapter and the structure… I’m also doing training shortly about how to write grant applications, so I’ll keep this project in mind then. Perhaps I could secure some funding to keep the book inexpensive or even free? Who knows, you have to ask. 🙂

There are some possibilities coming up that perhaps more training and resources will become available here in SA soon. I’m very mindful that at present, while we have the group Bridges, we lack supports for carers/family, and also training opportunities for support workers and professionals. Talks are happening about what we can do in these areas, which is very exciting to me! A year and a half down the road from my first terrified talk about DID, I can now see what I’d like to change about the talk I wrote and better ways to present the information to make it easier to understand. Building a library of books and accessing journal articles in these fields has been absolutely invaluable to developing my framework and understanding of dissociation, multiplicity, trauma, and recovery, as has so many people generously and courageously sharing their personal experiences. There is so much to learn yet, but even the little we know now could make such a huge difference to so many people out there.

It breaks my heart that so many people are suffering so needlessly and so alone with these experiences. I am furious that some staff are still telling people that dissociation doesn’t exist or all symptoms are invented for attention. I am so distressed by the chronic pain, high levels of suicidiality and self harm within a population that has one of the best responses to appropriate support of all the mental illnesses! There is hope and there is help, but so many people don’t know that yet. There’s a lot of work to be done here. I did a course in Mental Health First Aid a little while ago, and it really frustrated me that a dissociative crisis wasn’t mentioned. Most people don’t know what one is, how to recognise or support someone in that situation. We talked about suicide, drug overdoses and panic attacks, which was great. Dissociation is also extremely common, often overlooked, and can be deeply distressing. Knowing how to recognise it and reassure someone in crisis that they are not going crazy, that these experiences are common and can be managed can sometimes make the difference between life and death. This is not rocket science! We can do this. We can make things a whole lot better for a lot of confused, scared, lonely, creative, resilient, amazing people out there who deserve a better deal.

AC Arts Orientation

/ Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments
Well, I dragged myself out of bed and onto the bus yesterday for the orientation for my Bachelor in Visual Arts. I’ve been looking forward to this a great deal, being a single student enrolment until now meant I never had any directions around the campus or instructions about how to use the library etc. Now I’ve had a crash course in both. It was great to have a look through the ceramics studio – this term I’ll be doing the foundation class in ceramics, and next term the one in sculpture. I’d never seen it before and it is impressive! I can’t get over how well set up the studios are, they are such inspiring spaces! Ceramics is in the basement behind the Light Gallery space – many years ago I had my year 12 artwork exhibited in that space! There’s a room for throwing (that’s where you work clay on a ‘wheel’ a disc that spins, to create pots and rounded shapes like that) another couple for hand building, one for glazing, and a kiln room. I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on some clay.

There is a relationship between ceramics and sculpture, A sculptural form can be made from clay and might therefore be considered a ceramic sculpture. Ceramics as a term covers everything made from clays or earth. I’ve always loved the feel of clay in my hands, I did my work experience at the Jam Factory, and my favourite of the menial tasks was reclaiming the clay. Clay that had dried out was set in huge lumps in a vat of water. I would reach in up to my armpits to squish and work the water into the clay as it softened. Pretty awesome.

I have contracted a head cold or throat infection or some such bug, so I’m feeling pretty dreadful. But this week still has full days, today I’ll be at the Peer Work orientation, then Sound Minds, then the Radio Adelaide induction in the evening. I think by Saturday I’m just going to fall over and sleep for the weekend. I was going to invite my new neighbours round for afternoon tea, but I think giving them all a cold is not the best way to introduce myself. Maybe next weekend.

In the meantime, I’m working hard on building new routines and making sure I’m not so busy that I let my health slip. I’m making very healthy lunches and snacks to take with me, drastically cutting back on sweets and treats, and taking Charlie out for a brisk 20 minute walk every evening. I’m also working hard on keeping my sleeping patterns manageable, I now have an alarm that goes off at 11pm every night to get me off to bed and taking my meds early. The new meds are suiting me well, although the throat and ear infection has badly set off the jaw pain so I’m having a bit of a rough time at the moment. I’ve also started coming home from a big day and having a nap if I’m really tired, before going for a walk, making dinner, and taking the evening slowly. Sometimes getting overtired will stop me sleeping so I’m hoping this will help keep me on an even keel. I’ve been really good this year about keeping to three meals a day and I’m finding my appetite has significantly increased as a result – which is weird and a bit unsettling after many years of not ever feeling hungry. I’m carrying healthy snacks of fruit, nuts, seeds, and yoghurt to keep my energy levels up and lots of water. I’ve also made a big cut back on sugar and replaced it with stevia wherever I can to try and protect what remains of my teeth.

It’s going to take some time before all this becomes my new routine and easy to keep to, but I’m pretty determined. I can only keep up with my planned schedule if my health is well supported so I’m hoping better quality food, sleep, and exercise will help me keep up the pace. The other really important thing is maintaining my social support so my mental and emotional state are also going well. By the end of today’s induction, surrounded by predominantly much younger students and feeling pretty wrecked, having to get a photo taken for my new ID card was enough to destabilize me considerably. Photos and mirrors can be a pretty challenging area for me – very common for people who experience dissociation. There’s a lot going on that stretches me at the moment, the new house, taking the bus, new classmates, plenty of fuel for anxiety and stress. I’m very excited about everything and also keeping a pretty close eye on myself. That resilient/vulnerable combination can really catch you by surprise on occasion! Fortunately they were happy to use my previous photo for the new card, so I got out of there and home without any meltdowns. One down, two more orientations to go!

Tiger’s been adopted!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
Great news! A lovely cat I was fostering for a few months last year has finally been adopted! I’m thrilled for him, he’s got the most lovely gentle personality and a lot of love. I’m sure his new family will love him to bits!

I won’t take on any new foster cats at the moment, particularly as Loki is still pretty unwell with some unidentified virus (according to the vet) which I wouldn’t want to pass on. He’s in slightly better spirits than he was, and is finally putting some weight back on. I’m also noticing his coat is improving a little, so I have my fingers crossed for him. Unfortunately when cats are ill their toileting habits may become disrupted – my mornings typically start with mopping up puddles round the house at the moment. Thank goodness my place is all lino!

Charlie is also improving a little, I’m trying new ear drops for the persistent infections, and he gets his eyes bathed with salt water a couple of times a week. He is loving his new smaller home with no stairs and a small yard. I’ve finally settled him into sleeping on his bed in the shed at night by making sure I don’t feed him until bedtime and I put the food right by hid bed. As he’s completely blind he no longer knows night from day and his sleep rhythms are all out. I’ve been having a lot of trouble with putting him out for the night and having him howl and sook. I’ve tried sleeping him indoors but that results in a lot more cleaning up for me in the morning. The little garden shed is a nice big dog kennel for him at the moment, which is good because the ventilation is much better than in a little kennel and it stays a  bit cooler on warm days. It’s also right in the shade of my big peppercorn tree which helps a lot. He’s dropped a little bit of weight on a restricted diet and with lots of walks, which is great because he has quite bad arthritis in all his legs so you don’t want him lugging around more kilos than is healthy. That and his dicky heart… Ah well, we’re all limping along.

Sarsaparilla moved in a few days ago and is settling in well, so my little family now has two cats and a dog. I’m also starting to bring my potted garden along in carloads, there are figs on my fig tree! Very exciting. My lawns are responding to some TLC, I’ve mowed the front and I’m watering every couple of days to get it back into a good state. I’m mindful that the units all have nice gardens and older folks so I’m keen not to irritate anyone with a scruffy yard. I’ve nearly moved all the books over, but haven’t started yet on unpacking and sorting clothes or most of my studio. I’ve carefully wrapped and packed my good brushes somewhere… wish I could remember where! Darn move has left my energy pretty low but I was expecting that. A few weeks and I should be feeling brighter. Great news about Tiger, it’s really good to have both the foster cats I was looking after in new homes, and I hope they will have very long and happy lives.

New inks!

/ Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments
My ink order from Goulet Pens arrived just before I left for Broken Hill last week, and I’ve taken a little time out today to try some of them out. What a fantastic product! Excellent website and personal service too, I certainly recommend them. I am thrilled with this collection. Here’s the whole set:

All the inks are 2ml samples of Noodlers varieties. There are 2 browns, 4 blacks, 3 greens, 4 reds, 2 yellow/orange, 4 blue, 3 purple, 2 pink, and 1 grey sample. The sample size is large enough for me to make a number of artworks from each, which is fantastic. You can also see my two new fountain pens, the Noodlers Flex is red, and the closer is a Lamy that I’ve converted so the body of the pen becomes a huge ink reservoir. It writes surprisingly well, very wet (ie it lays down a lot of ink) and smooth. The syringes are blunt and used to draw up the last of the ink from bottles or samples.
I’ve been making up reference sheets for the inks to explore how they function, here’s the ink I already own and do most of my ink paintings with; Noodlers Air Corp Blue-Black in my standard fountain Parker pen:

This is Noodlers Zhivago in my new flex nib pen – it’s gorgeous! A little rougher to write with, but all those lines are made in a single stroke, thick or thin is determined by the pressure I put on the nib. I can see me using this extensively in my artwork now.

 Noodlers Purple Martin:

 Noodlers Squeteague:

 Noodlers Tiananmen:

 Noodlers Habanero:

I am so pleased with these, they are stunning colours with great range and depth. As soon as I can find my decent brushes and paper (packed somewhere…) I’m looking forward to spending a very contented few days painting. Looks like 2012 is going to be a good year for art too!

What is Peer Work?

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Peer Work is drawing from your own experiences to support someone else. It’s an idea that’s been around for many years in health, for example cancer survivors running groups to support people newly diagnosed. It’s fairly recently a role that’s becoming respected in Mental Health. At the moment many people are employed to support carers, perhaps called Carer Consultants, who have or are themselves carers and can support, educate and relate to other carers in a personal way. This is one kind of peer work. Consumer Consultants are people who draw upon their personal experience of living with or having had a mental illness themselves to support, encourage and educate other people. When the term Peer Work is used in mental health, this is usually the kind they are referring to. There are many names for this ‘peer work’ role such as Consumer Educators, Community Workers, Mental Health Educators, Peer Facilitators etc., and it’s becoming more common for mental health teams in hospitals and community centres to have Peer Workers on staff. Peer Workers are also often in voluntary roles such as visiting people in psychiatric hospitals.

What do you need to do to be a Peer Worker? You do need to be reasonably well yourself, whether living well with your condition, or recovered from an episode. Anytime you draw upon your experiences to help another person, you are doing peer work. Many peer workers find that this isn’t so much a job description as a part of how they live their lives. Even if you are very unwell and in hospital, if you can listen, encourage, give useful information to, or in some way make things easier for another patient, you are doing peer work, in my opinion.

If you’d like to become a peer worker, there is some training you can do, through the Peer Work Project here in SA. It will also help if you spent time with other people with mental illnesses through a community centre or online perhaps. Often we know a great deal about our own condition, but very little about other mental illnesses. Broadening your knowledge can help you relate to and support more people. I’d suggest you attend or volunteer at a local club, centre, or hospital that supports people with mental illness.

What does a Peer Worker do exactly? Well, that depends, the roles can vary tremendously. Some people work one on one and support people living with mental illness. Some people give talks, sharing their story with different audiences – perhaps people who have little experience of mental illness and who may benefit from putting a human face on labels and conditions. Other people run groups, perhaps around a skill, activity, or particular experience (eg. anxiety). Some people do admin and get peer related resources up and running such as online websites.

Being a good peer worker involves a passion for this work, a willingness to be open about your experiences, excellent listening skills, lots of patience, and good support. Good boundaries, a degree of stability, and the ability to handle having a foot in both worlds (part ‘consumer’, part ‘staff’) will help a lot. Peer Workers, like everyone else in this field, are vulnerable to burn out so you really do need to take good care of yourself, have good support and pay attention to your early warning signs. Having said that, for many of us the opportunity to convert painful experiences into something that helps people and to feel useful is a crucial part of our recovery. If it suits you, you can find a good balance, and you have good support, then Peer Work can be one of the things that supports your mental health.

Poem – Driving Home

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
One of the poems I read while at Broken Hill last week:

Driving back to where
My home lies in darkness
I feel it all shift around me,
This other world, this night world,
So different from the day, spent
In the company of those who fear darkness.


I feel my poet wings descend
As the streetlamps tease out my buried heart
I laugh as the cold wind hits my face
And for a moment, between worlds,
Wonder what this is, and why, and how to explain it
To anyone other than poets.

New training opportunities

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments
Hot off the press – What’s On has details for some great training coming up with very limited places. If you’re interested in peer work or art, or looking for free or low cost courses, hop over there and check them out! I’ve booked in to a few of them myself.

Back to cleaning and sorting…

Nesting

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Nesting is an idea that may be useful for you to explore if feeling chronically unsafe is part of your life. This may be as part of an anxiety disorder, a dissociative condition, for someone with self harm issues or who is highly reactive to triggers, and so on. The idea of a nest is to create for yourself a bolt hole to retreat to when you are feeling very unsafe and overwhelmed. Kids often instinctively do this, they may hide under the bed or in a cupboard or up a tree when they are scared. If you did this as a kid it may be you can replicate a similar sense of safety for yourself now by tapping into that good memory. I used the term nesting to describe this behaviour because it is so strongly linked in to your environment rather than other techniques that may be about self talk or moving your body in calming ways for example. That’s not to suggest this is in some way a better approach – there’s a lot of options out there and by no means do they all work for everyone. Nesting is also often the term used when a parent prepares a room or nursery for a child, and that has a similar concept behind it – to make a safe, comfortable pleasant place.

For many people, their home is their nest and they feel safe there and don’t need to think any further about it. To them, the idea of creating a nest for yourself may seem a bit ridiculous or childish. But many of us who feel chronically unsafe don’t find our home serves this purpose, and sometimes harking back to childhood and finding a way to calm our ‘inner child’ is more effective than efforts to maintain a mask of being ‘grown up and coping’.

If you can make your home feel safe that would be fantastic. If you live alone, it may be that you need good bolts on your windows, a lovely big dog, your own posters on the walls or music playing to help you feel like you belong and this is your space. If you’ve been burgled or assaulted in your home, this might be a real challenge. It can feel like the walls were torn apart and your sense of security turned out to be an illusion. The memories of people who came into your space may linger and torment you. You can over time reclaim your own space and drive these memories out. But if you’re having trouble with this, you might find it easier to start with something smaller.

It can be ideal if your bedroom is a safe place for you, especially as we spend so many hours sleeping and vulnerable there. For some of us though, the bedroom is the most tainted and difficult room in the house. If this is causing you major problems, don’t be afraid to rearrange. It doesn’t matter if you sleep on the couch or drag your mattress into the kitchen. Whatever you need to do to start to feel a little safe is worth trying. Once you can find a toehold on safety, it may be then that you can start to reclaim more and more territory. Sometimes it’s just finding that first toehold that gets everything started.

Follow your instincts in creating your own nest. If the wardrobe was a safe spot as a child, it may be that you can put a pillow, some stuffed animals, a flashlight and a book in there and hide out whenever the dissociation/flashbacks/panic attacks/urge to self harm etc gets bad. When I was a little kid, I read a book about meteors. It told the unfortunate true story of a woman who went to sleep one night in her rocking chair and was struck by a meteorite and killed. Being a highly stressed child with a vivid imagination, I linked her death to the act of sleeping and developed a terror of sleeping in my bed. For many months I went to bed obediently, then dragged my blankets off to the bottom of my wardrobe where I figured the meteorites wouldn’t be expecting me!

This little story is a great illustration of the kind of logic we have as children, and this kind of logic can sometimes be in play for those of us under high stress. Sometimes if we can put aside our need to look ‘normal’ we can speak our own emotional language and meet those needs. Whenever we do things that communicate to our self that we are looking after ourselves and working to make things safe we’re sending good messages. Sometimes that alone is enough.

One of my ‘nests’ is my bath. It eases joint pain, it wasn’t a tainted location for me, and I find it comforting and safe. My preference is to set up candles and oils and music and nest in properly. I keep topping up warm water and stay there as long as I need to. I find putting my ears underwater where I can’t hear anything but my heartbeat is very soothing. I’ve had some struggles with self harm when I’ve felt very unsafe, and there have been days where I’ve crawled out of bed and into the bath – with clothes or PJ’s still on, and just stayed there until I was safe to walk past the knife block in the kitchen. I think 9 hours was my longest stay. I might feel stupid or really annoyed with myself but I get out of those situations safely and that’s often more than the ER can offer me.

I’ve also used my computer space as a nest sometimes. Surfing the net can be quite trance inducing, hours pass without you really noticing. I’ve used this to reduce building panic or wait out dangerous situations too. When my bedroom has been simply impossible to cope with, I’ve dragged the mattress out into any other room and slept there that night. My bedroom has posters of my favourite artworks, an oil burner, music player, my journals, everything in it that I can use to make myself feel safe and at home. I put the kind of thought into it that expecting parents put into a nursery, and I keep playing around with the contents and arrangement until I find a set up that mostly works. It has to be familiar and to speak to me specifically. I often put up quotes and poems that I find inspiring or reassuring, and I keep my favourite books by my bed where I can reread them whenever I need to. Bolting back to a familiar environment is one of the keys of a good nest. For some people it might be their craft space, their kitchen, their shed, their garden… the possibilities are endless. All it needs to be is close by and some place that feels safe.

Fear and stress often have a regressive effect on us, and this can be really challenging to deal with. We are often deeply committed to our idea of ourselves as rational adults, and when we suddenly present with the emotional logic of a traumatised child it can take a lot of courage to face and meet those needs. But the pay-off can be huge. There’s a lot of ways to work on increasing a sense of safety, nesting is just one suggestion. If it doesn’t appeal to or work for you, try not to be too disheartened. You will find what you need. If you hadn’t thought of it but if it strikes a chord, you might want to go look at your environment with new eyes and see where your nest – or burrow, or eyrie, might be.

Home again

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I’ve made it home from Broken Hill. The train trip felt like no time at all, but dozing through the day has left me thoroughly tired and groggy. The pets are still alive! In fact, Loki the cat is looking far healthier, which is wonderful. Charlie was apparently a complete nuisance but the lady looking after him is a tough cookie and looked after him like a star. I think he needs another vet trip, he’s still in pretty poor shape despite my efforts. His ear is still a problem despite the drops the vet gave us, his eyes look gummier than they should… he’s a bit of a wreck really! I think the lady who was looking after him has a bit of a low opinion of me as a pet owner at the moment! 😦 We’ll get there. He loved his walk this evening and is getting used to the new route and tripping up less.

I’m making progress on the move and getting a little more essential furniture organised. I now have a bed set up and a gorgeous second hand IKEA computer cupboard! I was very lucky to pick it up from eBay for 99cents. 🙂 I went to collect it and the owner kindly dismantled it in front of me so I could work out how to reassemble it, then it only took an afternoon to put it up. Now I’ve made use of the bit of space behind my front door, and I can pack away my computer so furry cats and blind dogs don’t blunder into it or snuggle up to it. I’m very pleased! The comfy chair was recycled from the hard waste collection a couple of years ago.

Which is pretty good looking I reckon considering it started off like this:
I’m very glad I made the trip to Broken Hill despite the hassles at the outset. It was very resting and refreshing, great to get to spend time with my friends there and renew my passion for the Australian Outback and bush. With a bit of careful budget balancing over the next few weeks I should be back in the black and all set to start my study. The next couple of days will have an emphasis on unpacking and putting away clothes, food, and urggghh some of the paperwork. Maybe the paperwork anyway. I feel reasonably confident about tackling the food and clothes, and watering the lawn, washing all the dirty laundry, and catching up a bit on things for the DI (Dissociative Initiative – see My Resources)… I have a talk for the Voices Vic conference to plan which I’ve been starting to think about… back into the swing of things!

Storms in Broken Hill

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments
Last night, there was thunder, lightning, masses of rain and occasional blackouts here in Broken Hill. I do love a good storm. Storms are such a sensory experience, the smell of the rain (ozone), of earth turning into mud, crushed grass, rain on my skin, hair, face, hands tingling with cold, water running over my feet, lightning crashing and making my hair stand on end, feeling thunder in my bones and gut… As my personal grounding kit leans more towards intense than calming, I like to really take the time to enjoy storms. Whether that means going for a walk or drive in them, doing some gardening, going for a swim, sitting by an open window to write poems to the lightning, head down to the beach, or on a few memorable occasions, sitting in a outdoor bath of hot water. Storms are one of my times to stop everything else and ‘smell the roses’ as it were. I celebrate being able to feel and perceive and having my plans and routines interrupted for a little while.

Last night as the storm clouds rolled in, a couple of us took a car up to the top of Broken Hill, the lode, to take photos. We watched the storm come over the city, ran back to the car being lashed with rain, lightning and thunder all around, then drove the streets to watch the roads turn into rivers. Broken Hill has no drains – a little sad, I love the sound of water running down drains. Instead it has steep gutters and all the roads flood to pour down into the nearby creek. Amazing to watch and drive through.

It’s still raining today. I’m going to go for a walk back to that wonderful bookshop and decide if I want one of those fantastic art books put aside for my birthday by an obliging family member… I hope you also have cues in your life that remind you to put aside plans or gripes and feel alive every once in a while. 

Australia Day

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
Happy Australia Day everyone! I’ve never seen the day as anything other than a very welcome public holiday really, but today hanging out in Broken Hill I have felt particularly Australian. Coming up here is rather like going to visit relatives for me, the welcome is so warm. I could very happily spend a few months here working on art or poetry sometime. I’m going to investigate my diary and see if I can find a time somewhere to use my cheap train tickets before they expire in April…

This morning I slept in, slept well – my new meds seem to be agreeing with me! I’m using hardly any painkillers to get through the day at the moment, only two or three compared with 16 or so. Then we went up to Silverton a nearby little village with a tiny population. The number of artists, writers, poets and creative people of all types around here is simply incredible. You can’t walk ten paces without running into a studio or gallery. No wonder I feel so at home! We spent an hour or so wandering through the museum there, which was incredibly well stocked with all kinds of paraphernalia, then had a drink and a hot dog at the Silverton Hotel – which has been rebadged for many movies and commercials, the most famous is probably Mad Max.

 Then it was home to the Tourist Lodge for a swim in the pool and an afternoon nap for me. Bliss! This evening the local poets congregated by the pool, had a fantastic BBQ and shared poems, songs, and music together over wine. I found a lovely pink moscato and my poems seemed to go down well. There was a great range of styles; humorous, poignant, observational, melancholy, war poems, narrative, and a few from poets not with us. We remembered Geoff, a Broken Hill poet with a taste for the irreverent and a love of words who sadly passed away last year. A couple of folks had great flair on the guitar and sang us sad or lusty songs. There is such a wonderful Australian tradition of story telling and joke telling and we have such a rich history of talented poets. I feel very proud to be part of that tradition, very at peace to spend time with poets in such a peaceful and intimate setting. There’s just something special about this place. Just what I needed. 

Contentment in Broken Hill

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I had almost forgotten how much I love to travel. There is such a pleasure in breaking my own familiar routine and going somewhere new. I used to really struggle with it. I remember my first train trip over to Melbourne a few years ago, crying on the train because I was so overwhelmed with the disorientation of being in an unfamiliar environment. Being back in Broken Hill again is the best of all worlds, new but also now familiar. I love the flat landscape with the little hillocks, the balls of shrubs and grasses in shades of grey-green and olive. The sky is a magnificent blue and the earth rust red or fire orange.

I’ve had a wonderful day. I spent the morning doing the last of the critical admin, and was finally able to get my tafe account unlocked so I could finish enrolling my classes. In the end I decided to drop the second class, Art history, for first term. Mostly because I’ve got a place in a Radio Adelaide class instead and can’t fit them all in. The rest of the day I have been utterly lazy and indulgent. I meandered up the main street in the afternoon, through the softly falling rain. Window shopped, being tempted by raspberry vinegar, imported turkish delight, a two litre home ice cream maker… The bookshop Browers was as always a favourite. Considering the higher than usual population of artists in Broken Hill, the art shops and the bookshops are very well stocked. There was a book on torch worked glass that made me want to cry. I had no idea such beautiful forms could be achieved with only a torch! I am keener than ever to set up a glass studio in my home. (or perhaps, backyard) I’ve no idea how you sell any of it because there is no way I would put anything in the post but I just itch to melt and twist and shape glass… Another was on bead embroidery, another passion of mine. I have a couple of books on this topic already, but this was unique in that it showed how to safely back bead embroidered jewellery to give it the structural strength to be worn and last. I was really impressed with the quality of the work. Last time I was here I came home with the book on sumi-e (Japanese Ink Painting) and a photographic book of Australian artists in their studios. Magnificent! Plus, the bookshop name (Browsers) always reminds me of Bowser’s Castle…

Tomorrow is planned a trip to Silverton to investigate a museum there, and perhaps going home with one of the poets to admire their art collection. We had a quiet night by the pool here at the Tourist Lodge, dinner was an incredible korma and we chatted and joked and talked about poetry into the night. Someone found a guitar and sang for us, stranded travellers found lodging, we sipped at wine, kids splashed in the pool. I am a very busy person, and I derive a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from being productive, from learning and making and achieving goals. But it is also so wonderful to be unproductive for a time, to sit and watch and listen and feel the rain gently falling. I’m so glad I came.

hibiscus, dripping with rain 

The Broken Hill for which the town is named 

The Nimbus 2012?

I’ve never seen a prohibition with a time window before

Noticing drought hardy plants for future reference

The lovely resident gargoyle sends her regards 

I’ve plenty of poems ready for the reading tomorrow and am looking forward to hearing what everyone else has been working on. I am feeling even more inspired to publish a booklet of poems soon! It’s going to be a wonderful Australia Day here, I hope yours is great too.

Arrived in Broken Hill

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments
I’ve arrived in Broken Hill for the poetry event! I am really tuckered out and short of sleep. I was going to forget about having left my script at the chemist for my new meds and collect them when I got back to Adelaide, but I realised that they also had my pension and medicare cards – and I’d need my pension card to travel on a concession ticket. I’d like to give you some unsolicited advice – don’t go travelling straight after moving house. It’s very stressful! I have shifted most of my furniture but I’ve barely started unpacking. My clothes are still in garbage bags, my food in boxes… I was trying to keep track of all the essential paperwork I’d need throughout January, enrolment forms and suchlike. Last night I started looking for the ticket to the train to Broken Hill, and an hour and half later I managed to dig them up. I couldn’t lay my hands on my travel vouchers but as they’d already authenticated my pension card I figured that shouldn’t be a problem. By 4am I’d managed to set the house up for the pets to be minded, find my enrolment forms to bring with me and finish online, rearrange my room and put all the drawers in my dresser so I could put clothes away as I upended bags looking for bathers and other essentials for Broken Hill, removed all my journals from my suitcase to start packing it, and handwritten 26 poems because my printer was out of ink. Up at 7am, with my new sleep inducing but hopefully pain reducing med in my system, to hand keys over to my neighbour, pack clothes and toiletries, eat breakfast and head off to the train station. Between lack of sleep, weeks of high pain levels, and the heat I was pretty at the end of my tether. So, it was pretty shattering to find out that without my travel vouchers I couldn’t use my ticket. They couldn’t accept the electronic authentication, I couldn’t contact Centrelink and verify over the phone, or have them emailed or faxed. The federal government has mandated that you must have the original blue tickets to travel on them. So, it was either go home, or pay an additional $160. I decided to go on, but that completely demolished my savings and put me into the red. I see a lot of noodles and tinned soup in my future! Paying for all the courses up front as well as the costs of moving has left me pretty stretched.

So, I found a quiet corner and cried for a while, then dozed quietly on the train. They were a bit draconian on the train, the air con was set at 22 degrees, which I found cold. I hadn’t thought I’d need a jumper, and although they had a stock of nice towels, we were forbidden from using them for warmth. Half way through the trip I admired another travellers lovely plush blanket and she kindly lent me her second blanket, which warmed me up enough to reduce my jaw pain to manageable. Next time – bring the darn tickets, and a blanket!

I’m anxious about the pets in the hot weather, Charlie and Loki are sick so I hope they’ll be okay. Loki doesn’t eat when it’s warm, so I’ve been having trouble getting food down him. The vet have said there’s not much they can do for either, just keep them safe and lots of water and love… One of my lovely neighbours is a pet minder so I know they’re in great hands, I’m just worried!

Now that I’m here, I’m glad I came. The train trip was very relaxing and soothing. The folks here are friendly and welcoming and as it turns out the temperature is much lower here for the next week than in Adelaide. Much happier at the prospect of a week of swimming and poems instead of heat stress and misery in my un-airconditioned unit. Now, if I can just get a few more hours sleep I’ll be much happier. Have to run off now to find some tinned soup at the local shops before they shut. Take care of yourselves in the hot weather! 

Newsletter 3

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
Here’s the latest Dissociation Link newsletter. You can access it in pdf form here to download, print, or share easily. Please feel free to pass it along. 🙂

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Cleo’s been adopted!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
My darling little foster cat Cleo has found a loving family! She was collected tonight, they fell in love with her photograph online, apparently she resembles a lovely cat they used to own. I am so excited and a little bit sad.

What a sweetheart she is! Here she is helping decorate the tree at Christmas. She slept on my bed every night and was very smoochy and cuddly. I hope she settles in quickly and enjoys being the queen of her new home. I’m going to miss her, but I’m thrilled to have helped keep her safe and loved until she could find a new family. She’s such a sweetheart, I hope they love her to bits. 


If you’re looking for a cat, please consider adopting one. The network I’m a part of is Flicks Cat Rescue, they are on facebook and also have their own website here. You can also find pets for adoption on Pet Rescue, Flick’s has a lot of pictures on that site too, such as little Patchy. If you’re interested in being a foster carer or helping with fundraising or admin yourself, hop onto the website or facebook and sing out. We can always use some extra hands!