“So Much Harm Comes Into This World When The Wrong Thing Is Said. But That’s Nothing Compared To

Apologies for the format and need to zoom, but I thought this response was wonderful

september will be kind. september will be magical. september will bring the missing energy. september will be working towards our goals and self. september will be a month full of growth.

Workbooks and Self-Help Books for Mental Illnesses & Symptoms

Hello everybody! I was just thinking about how I always recommend people who can’t get therapy to use workbooks, so I thought I’d make a quick list of some you could look at. I’m not comfortable recommending books for things I have not struggled with (like, if I was looking at the description of a book on OCD I’d have no idea if it was good or not) but I think I’ve covered a lot. Some of these are series which have workbooks for specific disorders like bipolar, etc., if you want to find some. Plus, you don’t have to be diagnosed with something to use a workbook if you think it’ll help you.

Workbooks are sometimes made to be done in conjunction with therapy, or something like that, but anyone can still get something out of them if you put in regular work and try to apply the skills.

I’ve linked them all the Amazon because they’re usually cheaper on there.

For reference: DBT = dialectical behaviour therapy, CBT = cognitive behavioural therapy, ACT = acceptance and commitment therapy

Anxiety, Depression, and Intrusive Thoughts

The CBT Anxiety Solution Workbook

The Anxiety and Worry Workbook

The DBT Skills Workbook for Anxiety

The Anxiety Toolkit

Depressed and Anxious: The DBT Workbook

The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression

The Cognitive Behavioural Workbook for Depression 

Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts 

The Anxious Thoughts Workbook

Borderline Personality Disorder

The BPD Survival Guide

Stronger Than BPD

You Untangled

Mindfulness for BPD

The BPD Toolbox

Beyond Borderline: True Stories of Recovery 

Interpersonal Problems

The Interpersonal Problems Workbook 

ACT for Interpersonal Issues 

Anger

The DBT Skills Workbook for Anger

The Anger Workbook for Teens

Anger Management for Everyone

ACT on Life Not on Anger

Trauma and PTSD

Overcoming Trauma and PTSD

The PTSD Workbook For Teens

The Complex PTSD Workbook

You Empowered

Self Harm

Freedom from Self harm

Stopping the Pain: A Workbook for Self-Injury

Rewrite: The Journey from Self-Harm to Healing

General Emotional Issues/Multiple Disorders

Letting Go of Self-Destructive Behaviors: A Workbook 

The DBT Skills Workbook

Don’t Let Emotions Run Your Life

The Mindfulness Solution for Intense Emotions

The Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance Workbook

Thoughts and Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods Workbook

Your purpose in life is not to love yourself but to love being yourself.

If you goal is to love yourself, then your focus is directed inward toward yourself, and you end up constantly watching yourself from the outside, disconnected, trying to summon the “correct” feelings towards yourself or fashion yourself into something you can approve of.

If your goal is to love being yourself, then your focus is directed outward towards life, on living and making decisions based on what brings you pleasure and fulfillment.

Be the subject, not the object. It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself. You are experiencing life. Life is not experiencing you.

Hey, I just want everyone to know that what the world is going through is a legitimate trauma. Full on. It fits the “official” definition and everything. This is a traumatic event.

That means that it’s normal and expected to find yourself using coping mechanisms that you thought you were done with, to find yourself numbed out, to be on the verge of constant panic attacks, to be acting impulsively and compulsively, to engage in very old patterns, to have wide swings of every behaviour especially regarding sleep, food, and sex.

The research shows that people in a traumatic situation who most often develop PTSD (which I would say we are all at risk of) or have their existing PTSD/C-PTSD intensified are folks who cannot or believe they cannot do anything about it the trauma event.

So, if you are able, look for a place in all of this where you can feel that you can do something. Harass a company not doing enough for its employees, sign a petition, check in on a neighbour, set alarms to remind yourself to eat (it’s on my own to do list for today), intentionally spend time every day doing straw breathing to shift your sympathetic nervous system response. You don’t have to become some social media hero, or spend all your time improving yourself. But if you can find something that makes you feel like you can do something for yourself that decreases the trauma load on you, it will greatly benefit you going forward.

If anyone has any questions about this, my asks are open, or you can message me. (I cannot do any online therapy, I am happy to share information about trauma itself and any tools that I know)

It is okay to reblog this.

- Registered Clinical Counsellor, with 10+ years specifically working with trauma

Georgia Voters *who voted in the November 2020 Election* are finding themselves PURGED from voter records.

This video explains how to check this and how to re-register

Deadline to re-register is Dec 7th

AvPD and how we control anxiety.

(Part of my ongoing series of posts on Avoidant Personality Disorder.)

So in anxiety disorders, there are “safety behaviors” that are things you do to manage your anxiety.

Like when people with social anxiety are around other people, they’ll play with their phone,

or stay in the bathroom longer than necessary,

or avoid eye contact,

or only go somewhere with another person.

See also: compulsions in OCD.

It’s something you do while you are in the presence of your Feared Thing, to make it less scary/more tolerable.  It’s like a buffer.

But I’ve had a hard time figuring out what is the safety behavior in Avoidant Personality Disorder. So much of its actual presence in people’s lives (or at least in mine) seems to be: “terrified of being seen/rejected by others.” And where you have anxiety, you should also be seeing safety behaviors, right? But it’s not really talked about.

Obviously you can just AVOID people as much as possible, and not have to deal with it in the first place. (Like, clearly. I myself am a shut-in, because AvPD.) But what if you’re actually in it, facing this anxiety/threat? What do you do? How do you buffer the fear?

To lower AvPD anxiety, you de-escalate the intimacy.

I bet MOST of us have a kind of hierarchy of “how scary/how close is this type of interaction.” And if something is too scary, what do you do? Bump down the closeness a step.

You stop touching, step away, put a barrier in between you; you reduce the level of contact, from phone, to chat, to text, to email. (This is my hierarchy; yours might be different.) If you’re in a group and their scrutiny is freaking you out while you try to talk to someone, you go off and talk alone. Or if being alone with someone is too scary, you get somebody to go with you.

Online, maybe you size down the chat window or minimize it entirely between replies. You silence the notifications. You fullscreen something else over it. (Maybe you compulsively glance over to see if they’ve responded, like I do.)

If you’re trying to share something about yourself, maybe you choose to give it to them long-form all at once, so you can’t lose your nerve halfway through. Maybe you edit out select details that are Too Revealing, too unique, too you. Maybe you only share it with them when you've both agreed to discuss it immediately, so it isn’t hanging in the air between you.

It’s about this:

controlling how much access (ability to disturb) they have to you

controlling what they get to see

and monitoring how they react

The “safest” situation is one where they have very little access to you; where you only allow them to see a bare minimum of personal details about you; and where you can watch and try to mitigate how they are responding to you/what they think of you.

The most “unsafe” situation is one where

you can’t control how much access they have to you (i.e. you live with them or see them every day, you can’t get away from their influence/moods/judgments, or they have power over some aspect of your life)

you can’t control how much about you they get to see (i.e. no privacy, no boundaries)

and you can’t monitor or affect how they react (i.e. they find out a secret of yours and then abruptly leave, or they just won’t communicate their feelings with you at all, or you aren’t even aware of what they know until they confront you).

(Okay, so full disclosure, I basically just described my entire relationship with my mom. So this theory may have overlap with codependency, abusive relationships, and c-ptsd, rather than being pure AvPD.)

De-escalating intimacy = de-escalating trust.

You’re reducing their ability to hurt you -- you’re making “How much I am forced to trust you” as tiny and inert as possible.

Which is very useful in a situation where the person is actually going to (or genuinely might) hurt you.

But this eventual habit of lowering intimacy, lowering trust, also means creating distance between you and people you might actually like to form a connection with.

Once you are out of an unsafe situation, this --

controlling how much access they have to you, controlling what they get to see, and monitoring how they react

-- is no longer about managing a threat, or danger. It’s about managing anxiety.

And here is what we know: Compulsions, safety behaviors, avoidance ... anything we do to defend against anxiety, is self-reinforcing. The more you do it, the stronger the urge to do it next time.

There’s another thing:

When you avoid every single instance of interpersonal conflict, you never get the chance to learn how to handle it in a healthy way.

So, yes, when you get into a normal, not-dangerous argument with someone, or have to stand up for yourself, or defend your boundaries -- 2 things: You haven’t built up the skills to handle it in a way that feels safe, AND, you’re super sensitized to conflict because it’s rare.

Conflict is actually scary and feels out of control, times 2, on top of your pre-established fear. And that can be emotionally violent enough, that it can actually be traumatizing or re-traumatizing all on its own.

This obviously isn’t the whole story of AvPD. It’s a personality disorder, not just an anxiety disorder. But I bet for some people, including me, this is a huge chunk of it.

Levels of relationship, part 2: Safe people

(Part of my ongoing series of posts on Avoidant Personality Disorder. You can read part 1 of this post here.)

Having a safe person means so much.

When you have a safe person in your life, that relationship becomes really important. Here’s why.

With a safe person, I am welcome. It’s okay to exist.

They’ve demonstrated that they won’t hurt me, even when they have the chance. (They prove this by just literally not doing it, over time.)

They don’t react in the ways that I fear.

They’re consistently kind and supportive of me.

They’re actively considerate of my feelings.

A safe person cares about your feelings.

They really want to know how you feel, and they want to make sure you’re okay. How you feel actually matters to them.

And this is SO important for us -- because with AvPD, we are not good at dealing with our feelings. We’re not good at standing up for them, expressing them -- or even sometimes being aware of them.

So when someone proactively cares about how we feel, and maybe even encourages us (gently!) to open up ... it’s like they’re creating a space where our feelings are OK. It’s OK to have them, and to feel them, and to talk about them. And that’s something I don’t think people with AvPD get to experience much.

This could happen as subtly as you having an anxiety attack, and them acting calm and accepting instead of freaking out. You just get the sense that it’s okay. You’re okay with them.

Because our feelings are “allowed” in a relationship with a safe person, we’re able to let our walls down and let them see who we really are. It may only be a tiny bit of visibility, but it’s often a lot more than we have in any other relationship.

And when they respond positively to our self-revealing, we get emotional affirmation, and we can feel accepted. Which is hugely healing.

When we’re with them, we feel more like a whole person.

That emotional support and acceptance, in fact, is just like what people without AvPD get from their normal relationships.

And that’s why it’s so important to us. We have the same need for acceptance, friendship, and being liked as anyone else -- it’s just so much harder for us to receive it.

So with the rare person who can soften our defenses and let us feel safe being close to them ... that’s a treasure we never take for granted.

A note about dependency

I do think there’s some potential overlap with being dependent on someone (like with DPD or codependency). I became absolutely obsessed with my first safe person, and it wasn’t good for me or for them.

But I also think it's natural to value a “safe person” type relationship very highly, and to want to be close to them, and I don’t think that’s automatically unhealthy. This is just something we need to be aware of, and it’s a good idea to check on boundaries and comfort levels once in a while.

You can have more than one!

Just like people without AvPD can have more than one positive relationship, people with AvPD can have more than one safe person. It’s just equally rare to find a second person you “click” with that way. But there’s nothing automatically exclusive about it, and it can be nice to have more than one person to talk to.

It’s also a spectrum. Each relationship is unique, and it changes a little with every interaction. You might have one safe person who you’ve known for a long time, and then another one you’re still building a relationship with. The important thing is whether you get that sense of emotional support and acceptance from being with them.

And who knows? Eventually, you might just start calling your safe people “close friends” -- because that’s pretty much what they are for us.

Yes! This is very important. Those thoughts are coming from your brain because of your brain -- not because of who you are.

Think of all the situations you've experienced in the last year. Think of how many things you survived or accomplished or created. (Seriously, do it!)

Did you feel victorious and strong at the time? That would have been a feeling that was relevant to the situation, caused by the situation.

But a lot of us didn't feel inspired and mighty because of our victories. A lot of us still felt inadequate and fearful and ashamed. We didn't celebrate. We weren't in the moment. Our feelings weren't happening because of our lives -- just because of our brains.

Those are arbitrary feelings. In a way, they’re not quite tied to reality. Because they aren't dependent on what actually happens.

And when you're able to recognize them as such, it's a little easier to think of them as just background noise. “Oh, I’m actually anxious no matter what is happening around me. I actually feel bad about myself no matter how my life is going.”

And that can give you the chance to see what other feelings you may be having, in response to the actual situation.

Emotions are things that live and breathe, flex and bend and run parallel and contradict each other. They’re messy and real. So if how you feel doesn’t actually change with the situation -- something’s probably stuck!

something i need to repeat to myself five billion times: feeling that you’re the worst person in the world is part of a symptom, not some unfortunate, ultimate truth. there is nothing personal about it, despite what your brain may tell you. 

being soft, gentle and warm is a different kind of radical. the ability to allow yourself to be vulnerable is very powerful