Posted 7/20/2016 1:17 AM (GMT 0)
roxy:
Yes, manic-depression is an earlier term for bi-polar. With manic-depression, you get depressed, and then cycle so high without medicine (lithium for me) that you cannot sit still.
If an aunt deals with anxiety, she is related to a parent or grandparent who passed it down to her. So if a parent or grandparent passed it down to her, they can pass it down to you.
I first learned of my bi-polar from a man who knew my uncle, my mother's brother. My maternal grandmother had a non-descript (for its day) mental illness, which must have been bi-polar, but it was really not known about then.
I think it was called schizophrenia back then. I mean, talk about off base, schizoid is not knowing the difference between reality and fantasy, is what I've heard, and bi-polar is not that at all.
So, the first I really knew what I had was when a friend of my uncle told me, "Your uncle was manic-depressive, and you probably are too."
Before that, for about 20 years, I was misdiagnosed, and if you're miss-diagnosed, you're miss-medicated, and if you're miss medicated, you're not being treated properly.
We all have more time than the doctor has with us, so we can now go to the net, and look for hours, days, weeks, for what we think we are, write down our findings and show it to the doctor, who may have only 15 to 25 minutes with us every month.
Also, genetics can skip a generation. I can go from grandparent, not to their child, but to their grandchild. I would look at that woman's parents, your grandparents, for clues. I might talk to the aunt and to one or both of the grandparents.
You said in your first post, "I feel so emotional and mostly everyday I feel like I can't completely focus and my mind is just filled with negativity and worry."
You mentioned the negativity. I imagine you get into a state where you think of nothing but bad in your life, or think of 1 or 2 bad situations.
Along that line, negativity, here's something else I wanted to mention. I was at a group therapy meeting one time, and when it came my time to talk, I began my usual spiel about how all these things had gone wrong with me.
The woman sitting next to me, she was probably about to bust, and when I finally stopped, she looked up at me, her face about a foot from mine, and said, "Oh, you were having a Pity Party. We've all done that."
Dern that woman. Ruined my Pity Party. That's the one thing I was good at. Plus, she embarrassed me almost to tears, right in front of those other people.
But I till you what. She embarrassed me to the point that my mind doesn't want to ever go through that again, even when I'm by myself. To this day, whenever I start to have Pity Party, I see that women's face, and I near her voice, and it doesn't work.
I can't be that stupid 5-year-old that I was that day. She grew me up in 5 seconds. Four of it was just looking me in the eye after she said it. She nailed me to the wall, in front of others.
What I'm saying is, when you, like me, like that woman at one point in her life, start this negativity, you are on the wrong road. And this is not nervousness, which you say you can't deal with with positivity. This is separate.
If you are dwelling, for instance, on time A in your life, which we'll say was bad, and you are dwelling on the bad, and perhaps feeding a part of your psyche which really wants to be there down in the pits. It's like an addiction.
I use to think about my difficult marriage, we'll say, and my psy. would say, "Knock it off." I couldn't. What happened was a few months after that, I had this woman, this con artist, play me up with a snuggle for 5 seconds, and my emotions went through the roof, and a week later she asked me for a loan. It was a con job.
But what did it do? It knocked me out of that cycle of pity from a long-illness widow, and transferred my bad emotions from my window, to this female con artist because of the contact.
I never thought about my wife's meanness again. The next day, I took her cloths off the rack, after they had sat there for 5 years and I couldn't throw them away, to placing them on the bed to taking them to a donation site a few days later.
I'm just saying, with that, I detached emotionally from my widow. I don't know what this means, except, I couldn't disconnect from my wife until this other brief incident occurred.
So, I couldn't get out of that neg. either. But I am saying, if you keep going back to neg. areas in your life, having a Pity Party, I know a woman who could talk out of that. I think you can work on that.
Also, I would rec. you get a psychiatrist, instead of a general practioner.
I realize, the way I got into being positive was, a baby step. I woman columnist did not say you have to be positive all day long. I could not have done that. She said, in effect, only be positive when you're trying to solve a problem.
Again, even I could do that. For five minutes. Well, I tell you what, when you have that, you have that all day long, because there are problems all day long.
Every few minutes, something goes wrong in my day, and now, the first thing I say to myself is, think positive that you can solve this problem.
I use to tell myself, a problem is horrible, just like my parents told me. Well, the thing is, problems are bad, but our chances of solving them can be good. There's a difference.
You can be positive that there is medicine that can help. You can be positive that you can take minimum doses, and not be in a mental state hospital like my grandmother was because there was no medicine for that.
You can help somebody who is having more problems than you are like in a hospital where these kids and adults are having a rough time also, and you'll be in a better position to help them because you've got problems, also.
This helping somebody else through volunteering can get the mental energy turned around to someone who is having it worse than you, who you may be able to help.
You said my psy. was awesome rift? She is a good psy. and she is my comfort zone. I'll also ask her if she is awesome rift.