Therapy Log Printabl

It’s been a couple days since my last blog post, but they’ve been good – and busy – ones. I’ve started on my project for sociology, although I’m struggling to figure out what the application of society existing would mean for education. I’ve also adjusted my self care plan after discussing it with my psychiatrist, and am quite happy with the result. I’ve yet to do tonight’s cleaning, but do…

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6 Week Habit Improvement Plan

6 Week Habit Improvement Plan

One of my classes in college is cultivating self care, and one of the projects for the semester is creating a 6 week plan to build up your self care resilience. While doing the layout for the project I came up with a printable that may be useful to others, so I’ve decided to post it.

WeekMondayTuesdayWednesdayThursdayFridaySaturdaySundayOne       Two       Three       Four       Five       S…

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Can we change the world?

I’m pretty sure it’s obvious to most that the world is (and always has been) a bit of a mess. Trump has taken over the U.S, leading to a wave of right wing hate, Canada’s facing it’s own resulting wave of conservatism and an increase in hate crimes, and many other countries are facing political or environmental crises. Like it or not our world is shifting, socially and economically, and facing…

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To anyone with suicidal thoughts this year, thank you for sticking around. I'm so glad you are here.

Yup. And if you do share it too much you're too negative and focused on your problems.

“It’s like your sadness is so deep and overwhelming that you’re worried it will drown everyone else in your life if you let them too close to it.”

— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

Maturity

Growing up sucked for me. It does for a lot of people - mental health issues, abuse or neglect or any number of things combine and you have the potential for a child more broken than whole. I'm not sure if I was broken, or just didn't develop regularly, but Im pretty sure I went through at least one phase of emotional regression, possibly starting when I was around 12 years old. I know the origin of it, although I'm not ready to reveal it - the thought of exposing that part of my past makes me nauseous. I've done it in trauma therapy a few times now, and am planning to try and talk to a child psychologist for research at a later date, but that level of revelations is still something I'm working towards. I plan to, some day, if I can figure out how to do it respectfully, but I still don't know what that looks like.

I've been delving through my memories, trying to figure out just how much of my childhood and teens I do remember - in some ways there's more than I thought I would find. I'm kind of glad, but at the same time confused. When I was approximately 17 I was diagnosed with the emotional maturity of a 6 year old - my depression had escalated to the point where I was having crying jags very frequently. At times I felt like I was both falling apart and going insane. Everything was wrong, and the guilt from certain events in my childhood was killing me.

Nothing happened from the evaluation, and its taken me the last 15 or so years to understand how that maturity impacted my life, and it's only now that I understand why I made certain choices.

Most of my life I've been running - emotionally, not physically - from the people that raised me. I go into this in some depth on Instagram, but my grandparents were mentally and emotionally abusive and neglectful. Perhaps not severely - I still struggle constantly to call it that. Unfortunately that's rather how my life started out - parental neglect resulting in my removal from their custody & subsequent adoption by said grandparents, but it was rather like going from worse to not a whole lot better. I was physically safe, but rarely felt like they loved or wanted me around. Because of this and the constant conflicts between myself and them, I developed the emotional habit of running from grandparents to a boyfriend to get away from them.

That informed my decision making from the age of approximately 18 to that of 23 - 24? - when my last boyfriend broke up with me and I decided to commit suicide. Those choices were on my head, but the desperation to be somewhere else - to not be told how useless I was, or how unwanted, by dad, Grandparents, and oddly enough the parents of every single boyfriend I had - kept driving me to make decisions that resulted in my homelessness more than once. The last time I lived with my grandparents (after being kicked out of my last boyfriends parents house) my grandmother told me she wouldn't have cared if I'd committed suicide. That...to put it simply, was just another break in my ability to hope. It was only after the suicide attempt in 2008 that I was able to get a place of my own and stabilize. I was lucky enough to get into the psychiatric ward in Goderich Ontario - my mental health had deteriorated enough prior to this that giving up was easier than trying to start over, especially knowing that I was - quite literally - unwanted.

I'm not sure if this is worth reading, but eventually j hope to make something out of it. My story isn't that unique in its mental health features, but there are a few angles that I think are very rarely talked about. For now this is enough. Sorry for the rambling biography thing.

Started the day in tears, and don't have any clonazepam, so I'm going to sleep so I can be ready for work at 3. I want to heal, but it's fucking hard.

Bit of humor in here...who’s going to pet me?

There’s a little rat inside your head.

This rat doesn’t know anything, but it knows that sometimes snacks fall into its cage, and sometimes the floor shocks its feet.  It likes the snacks, and it hates the shocks.  It will tell you to do things that produce snacks, and it will tell you not to do things that produce shocks.

This little rat is not the only power inside your head, and it might not be the strongest, but it’s there and it has influence.

So pay attention to how you’re treating the little rat.

If every time you learn something new, you say to yourself “ugh, I’m so ignorant for not already knowing this,” you’re shocking the rat.  You’re teaching it to be afraid of learning new things, to associate it with embarrassment and self-criticism.

Remember to feed the rat instead.  Tell it “now I know, and that is good,” and let it eat its snack in peace.

If every time you take care of yourself and your home, you say to yourself “ugh, I never do this enough, and I’ll never get it right,” you’re shocking the rat.  You’re teaching the rat that it was safer when you didn’t try to take care of things.

Feed the rat instead.  Praise what you have done, forgive what you haven’t, so the rat can feel safe.

When the rat takes a step in the right direction, even if the step is too small or slow or not in quite the right direction, feed it.  Don’t shock it for being imperfect; it’ll only learn not to take any steps at all.  Feed it, and let it get bolder, and take bigger steps, and give it bigger rewards for those bigger steps.

Be kind to your little rat.

Growing Up

Call me Talyia. Going to use tumblr as a simple way to document the process of discovering who the fuck I am, medically, emotionally and mentally.

I have a fairly extensive history of emotional abuse and neglect in my past, along with certain types of sexual trauma I'm currently trying to understand. If you read this you may find that I'm an emotional mess, at others analytical, and at others just plain angry, but I'm going to learn about myself and grow even if it kills me.

Hope it's worth the read, although Im frightened over how much honesty is too much. Still need to think about that, but the person I am today is NOT the person I want to be tomorrow. I will grow, and be better than I am.