Moving On.

It has taken me far too long to get back to my blog!  But I wanted to update you all on some exciting times.

I last posted about my mums inquest and the great mess the community mental health team had made, causing a huge delay and much upset.  Well the inquest took place the day before we went off on holiday and I am pleased to say that it was all concluded.  I felt very listened to by the coroner who questioned the mental health team very well to get a clear picture of what had happened with their input.  The psychiatric nurse that was looking after my mum is no longer working for the trust (although still had to attend the inquest) and it was good to hear the coroner say to the manager and consultant that he hoped they had learnt some valuable lessons.  I may still go on to ask for a formal apology from the NHS trust at some point but for the moment I am letting it go.

The following day we jetted off to New Zealand for what turned out to be a most Blessed time.  I just wanted to tell you today though about two incidents which have totally helped me to move on from all the happenings of the last 5 1/2 years.  The first was a visit to some beautiful gardens called Little Paradise gardens and lodge.  It turned out to be one of the places we went to because we saw it by chance and though on first and second passing of it we were too tired to go, there was that niggle that stayed with both my husband and I, that we needed to go! So off we went, and it really was like tasting a little bit of paradise.  If you click on the link above you can see much of it's beauty. 

We chatted with the owner/gardener and it was funny to hear him saying that it was not looking it's best (they are just going into Autumn) as to us it looked beautiful.  He was not only the gardener but the sculptor as well and the picture at the top if of a life size is one of his.  So why was this sculpture of the many the one that touched something deep deep down inside me?  To understand I need to tell you about the counselling session that I had before I went away.  My counsellor asked me to imagine my 12 year old self sitting in the empty chair in the room and asked me what I would like to do/say to her.  Now I have often thought about what I might say/write to myself, knowing what I know now.  However I have never considered what I would do...........  I was very taken aback and there was quite a long period of silence before my tears started to fall.  It turns out what I would really like to be able to do to that 12 year old self is to pick her up, hug her and tell her how much she is loved.  Which brings me onto the photo.......

It struck me immediately, the identical clothing just confirmed it, this was me swinging, loving and enjoying my younger self - WOW!

I am sure this does not sound as profound as it feels for me but I wanted to get it written down.  I know there will be times when I forget about that moment and those feelings and I want to have a written reminder to go back to.

The next thing I want to tell you about is maybe a little more frightening!  I'll let the photo's tell the story.

 

 

 

192 metres + free falling +11 seconds of sheer exhilaration = JOY!!!!!!!

and if you want to know how much noise I made about it here you go

So I have left the past behind and am moving on, it feels great.  I am under no illusions, I know I will still have bad days but for now I feel like I can conquer the world!

God Bless,  Jane x.

In the Whirlpool.

I have started back with my counsellor.  It was a wonderful God-incidence to discover that she had a client finishing just as I called, in a slot I could take.  The relief of being able to see the same lady was immense, I'm not sure I could have started again with someone else, with all that has gone on.  Being remembered and not having to go back over the past has made returning much easier.

Having said that it is not an easy business facing up to things.  We were discussing the whirlpool of grief today.  Trying to actually name some of the feelings that are swirling around in my mind at the moment. I have had a revelation - I am totally illiterate at reading my own feelings.

Growing up feelings were either ignored or worse, discounted.  I have always wondered why when in emotional moments my gut instinct is to run away and hide.  There have been times when I have actually done this.  I remember during a turbulent relationship in my late teens, finding myself on the M1 driving to Leeds in my car.  I even got as far as deciding I would find a hotel room, before realising that I was a young woman on my own and had a safe bed to go to if I really wanted it.

So how is my illerateness (I'm sure that is not a word) affecting me now?  It means I can't tell those closest to me how I feel, because I don't even know myself.  I know I feel pants (awful) but I can rarely put my finger on why.  This means those around me have no idea what to do or say.  It also means that I just build walls with no doors and retreat (runaway) into myself.  And I can tell you that is not a very nice place to be.

What has shook me most is realising that I am going to end up passing on something to my children that I really do not want to - maybe they will start thinking they have done something to make me feel bad.  Maybe they will just think that I am forever grumpy.  Even worse than this maybe I will not be able to teach them how to identify their own emotions/feelings enabling them to handle things that they are going to have to face as they grow up.

So I have a choice, to learn to identify and vocalise my emotions or to stay as I am.  It really is a no brainer, however I know it is not going to be an easy journey.

All Change.

So I mentioned in my last post that I had made a big decision.  It is something that has been rumbling away for a few months now.  As my regular readers may know I have a condition called rheumatoid arthritis.  It is a condition that is always just there.  I'm fortunate enough to have great medication which has kept it reasonably stable for about 3 years now.  However, as well as aching joints always just there and preventing me from doing anything too active, the biggest effect it has on me is fatigue.

I will have had this condition for 16 years come this autumn.  It arrived 6 months after I got married (it's our 16th wedding anniversary tomorrow).  I don't very often think about what life was like before hand, that is one thing that can really bring me down.  Suffice it to say, I was very active, I used to run several times a week, go to the gym 3 or 4 times a week, walk and swim, just to name just a few acitivies.  In fact just weeks before I first became unwell my husband and I brought our first ever mountain bikes.

As well as having this condition I have also had 4 years of enormous stress.  This started with my sister suddenly dying, then becoming a kinship carer for her only almost teenage daughter.  After two years of constant anxiety while we tried to care for an extremely damaged child along with our two younger children we had to make the decision to hand her over to local authority care.  Then my father died, then my mother had a mental breakdown and spent 3 months in hospital, then my grandmother died in January this year.

Amazingly my arthritis has not got much worse during this time however the fatigue has.  For the last 4 and a quarter years I have been working my 20 hours a week as a children and youth Pastor for our local parish (2 churches).  I did take some time out to have knee operations 3 years ago and also 6 months unpaid leave to help with my recovery and the changes to home life with my niece living with us.  The parish I work for has been amazingly supportive, through much of the times of great stress (eg, my mum in hospital) work has been my escape.  It is something I felt called to do almost 10 years ago.  It started in a voluntary capacity for the parish where we live and after a short period of working for the local council when I decided to go back into paid employment I was offered the current parish in a neighbouring parish.

It has not been all plain sailing in the post, it has had plenty of challenges, however it has always felt like a Gift from God and I have always tried to treat it as such.  For the last few months however I have been having to come home from work and go to bed for several hours every day as my fatigue has increased.  Whether it is pain that increases and causes the fatigue or the fatigue that makes me more aware of the joint pain I have I don't know, but my joints are presently very very sore.  My breathing has become poor as my fitness levels are falling.

Being away on holiday in Orlando, Florida was great, what was not so great was the fact that I had to use a wheelchair for all the days out that we did because of the pain and fatigue my body has.  God has been speaking to me.  I finished 8 months of counselling last month, during that time I have been learning how to listen to myself without the critical voices that roam around me head interfering.  This has also enabled me to listen more carefully to God.

I am currently on sick leave from work and last week I finally realised it was time to stop working.  I know that if I don't have a go at getting fitter and loosing some weight now as I amble towards my mid forties, it is only going to get harder.  I might manage to loose weight and get fitter and still be in as much pain and suffering the same fatigue, but if I don't try then I will never know.  The way things are heading at the moment I feel I am going to end up spending more and more time using a wheelchair, if there is anything I can do to prevent this I have to give it a go.

So last week I had my resignation accepted, they have very kindly wavered my 3 month leave period due to my current health issues and so I will finish at the end of May.

The only problem I am now left with is how we are going to manage financially.  My work did not pay all that well, but it did pay for all the little extras we have come to enjoy.  The occasional spontaneous meals out, spending money on our holidays, buying extra things for the home, garden and the children without having to save up - all these things and probably a lot more are where my wage was spent.  Giving these up, and learning how to live on our reduced income is going to be a challenge, thankfully I do feel that God is with us.

So it's all change, on the whole I feel quite excited to see where God is going to take us and this new journey.  Hopefully it will include keeping on blogging :o).

People Pleasing.

I seem to have spent the last 40 years doing my very best to please the people around me.  My counselling has helped me to identify the areas in my life when I do this without realising.  I know why I do it and I can't change that.  However I do know that I can change.  So how do I cope with suffering  the consequences - the fact that I will disappoint people.  When I disappoint others it feels like the end of the world.  It is not as simple as just not liking being wrong - though I have been accused of this many times.  No body 'likes' to be wrong, but some people can cope with it far better than others.  I appear to be  the latter.

In the past this has led me to withdraw and 'protect' myself from the issue or people I feel caused the disappointing 'end of the world' feelings that I get.  So friendships and relationships have ended and working situations have changed.  This in turn has ended up with me being even more convinced that pleasing people is the only thing to do.  However this has a downside as well.  For one thing people pleases are false.  If  I am doing it in order to protect myself from conflict then I have to face the consequences, my natural creative self is going to be very stifled maybe snuffed out completely.

Gah - it feels at the moment like a no win situation.  I want to be the person that God created me to be, I want to be able to explore and make mistakes without the crushing feelings I end up with inside when others don't agree with me.  And most of all I want to stop having to 'protect' myself by running away!

Maybe other people who do not suffer with this 'affliction' could learn a little more sensitivity.  It does not mean that they have to suddenly start agreeing with everything I say.  That would solve nothing.  Language is maybe the key - maybe non people pleasers could instead of statements like," I disagree with you because....." make statements like, "could an alternative be ......."  or "my experience is this, which makes me believe ......"

I don't know if this would definitely solve things, but I would love to think that it might help.

Friends

I went along to my counselling session with plans that it would be my last one for a while.  Going along has enabled me to gain far more insight into the way I react to others around me.  This in turn has given me the wisdom to ascertain whether a problem is my own problem or belongs to someone else.  Having both these tools has been invaluable over the last rocky 14 weeks since my dad died and all that ensued.  The outside benefits are:

• I am far more relaxed at home.
• I consider time out for myself as a need and not a luxury.
• Family relationships are going along new pathways.
• There is more organisation/ order in my home.

It is therefore very easy to sit back and say 'that will do'.  However it seems God has a little more he wants me to deal with yet. Will I ever learn that God never wants me to just make do?  With half term approaching we got onto the topic of friendships.  I confessed that I have really not put very much effort into friendships for the last few years (or more).  There are practical reasons for this, when family life becomes chaotic it is natural for friendships to take a back seat.  However I am starting to realise that mine have been on the backseat for so long, that I have got to the point where I cannot remember and don't really feel I  have the skills to be reintroducing them into my life.

Since being a little girl I have learnt how to distance myself from things that hurt.  That is the coping mechanism that worked for me then and so it has grown up with me.  I am now recognising that I might be loosing out on something because of this distance.  With friendships it has been far easier to write a blog and keep facebook updates letting friends know what is physically going in my life.  However to avoid having to talk about it (because it all hurts so much), I have managed to stay away from the telephone and from meeting up with friends for far too long.

I believe friends are a God given gift, maybe it is the shrinking of my family (through death and other things beyond my control), that is making me realise I need to get back on track with friendships.  At the moment that feels like a really big and scary path to walk.  However I know that if I look at practically how far I have moved on since beginning my counselling in September, it should not be too painful to tackle another area.

So to any friends that are reading this, I am sorry and I will start talking again in real life and I am so grateful for your love, care and patience with me.

Injunctions.

I have been learning lots of new language in the last few months.  Mainly as the result of going to see a counsellor for the first time.  The one that keep coming back again and again through each session is injunctions.  Now I know the definitions of this word and I am sure that I have used it on occasions, however not in the context of feelings and emotions.

Many of the injunctions that we hear as we are growing up are very regularly used by lots of parents and are well needed - 'Don't do that' can stop a child sticking their fingers in a plug socket.  These are injunctions that we all learn from.  However I have discovered the biggest injunction (an authoritative warning or order) that I ever received that has really restricted my personal growth was 'STOP SHOWING OFF'.  I am sure that I am not the only child that had this said to them.  My problem is that it was said to me all the time, in front of all sorts of people.  Until I have started to really think about what this injunction means, it was just one of those phrases that if I ever heard it made me shrink inside.  So what does 'stop showing off' mean to me:

Don't do that you are embarrassing me.
Stop expressing yourself that way.
That is no way to behave.
No-one is going to like you behaving like that.

All these can be summed up in three words to me - stop being you.  You see, I am naturally extrovert, I don't mind being the centre of attention.  In fact I often thrive on it.  How sad that it has taken me 43 years to get to the point that I can accept this part of me.  I have probably ended up craving far more external validation that is actually healthy just because of this in juncture being so repeatedly handed out as I was trying to find out who I was for myself.

It is a very hard phrase to get rid of, there have been a few occasions when I have even found myself saying or about to say it to my children.  I feel so very grateful to the dear friend who once quietly pointed out to me that I had said it as an adult (in front of my mother to my children).  She did it with such grace knowing how deeply wounded I have always felt by the words.  And I am absolutely positive I have never even considered using it again since.  I have just tried Googling the phrase only to find it filled with really negative expressions.  If people didn't 'show off' how would we get to enjoy the art that other people are able to express by showing it off?  All writers would keep their books in their heads, all artists their pictures, all actors their skills of expression - what a dull and lacking world we would live in. 

So I have decided if you have an urge to 'show off' then do it!