Life is messy

Thinking I am messy is often a bit off the mark really.. I just think I grew up in a very controlled house with a Mum who used to freak out if things were not in control.. There was one day that the whole family laughed about where we were on holiday and some sheets blew off the line into the dirt and Mum had a complete melt down and apparently everyone teased and made great fun of her over it.. Now, knowing what my Mum endured as a child, I think it was kind of mean to laugh at her, my older sister who is now dead could be a bit brutal about this side of my Mum.. She would hit the roof if Mum tried to throw out old flowers left for too long in a vase at the care home for sufferers of acquired brain injury. That said this kind of reaction to mess was not an easy aspect of my Mum for us to live with, and is now very much internalized within me.

Things being lost or out of order does make me very anxious.. Today I misplaced a book I really started to get myself into a state about it.. of course I prayed about in and when I was almost about to give up looking, I finally found it.. Considering all I have lost in my life maybe these reactions make sense.. A friend today accused her daughter of suffering from paranoia but on reflection this seemed a bit harsh, her daughter has mental health issues and being told that you are paranoid if something is triggering you, to me seems to be lacking in empathy.

I also listened to a very interesting edition of All In The Mind today, it is a weekly program on mental heath that airs in Australia on our national station Radio National.. It concerned a sufferer of a diagnosis of a form of mental illness (unnamed) who was having no success with medication and was feeling put in a box by her psychiatrist.. It got me in a bit of a rage to be honest.. I am a bit fed up with psychiatrists but this again is probably a bit too harsh, there are a lot of good psychiatrists out there, I guess, who treat patients and are not just all about putting them into boxes,diagnosing and medicating without the use of other methods and mind or emotion based therapy.. I think the sheer fact of this woman struggling so with her meds and diagnosis was eventually what led her on to explore other options like mindfulness.. I didn’t listen to the end of the program as it was triggering me a little bit considering the state I feel my own sister to be in at the moment.

Maybe one of the ways we try to sort out ‘messy’ things is by this process of ordering and categorising.. When I was in such a state on Friday emptying out my entire fridge and freezer it helped me to organise the food and other related stuff into piles.. it made my head feel less messy, a diagnosis may show the variety and ways in which our mental machinations and emotional issues related to trauma or abuse operate and this is necessary to get a handle on what is going on.. For each of us who struggle with the long term effects of trauma, abuse, neglect, self harm or other complex issues we find our own methods and techniques as well as helpful and unhelpful things that work for us..I no longer believe in absolutes in relation to all of this and it is up to each of us to find our own way and methods.

I heard a very interesting thing said the other day about our human dilemma.. It said that humans and human behavior are complex but not complicated, that said we can tend to make things more complicated by the attitude we take to them. This issue of attitude is one I started to try to write a post on earlier today in relation to some things I am studying set up by Gerald Jampolsky who runs the Center for Attitudinal Healing which assists young people suffering from fatal illnesses such as cancer. Louise Hay is another person whose work very much deals with the way we relate to and the kind of relationship we end up making both with our own mind and thoughts as well as our inner child and associated emotions.. A lot of Louise’s work focuses on self love and self care, on not rejecting the person in the mirror but opening our hearts and souls and minds to love him or her unconditionally.. This kind of unconditional love is something so many seem to struggle with in our society….

Louise mentioned in a recent talk I heard that she finds in modern times a lot of people tend to stress themselves out by the things they tell themselves..the way we talk to ourselves is something I have been touching upon in a number of recent posts.. There is a self calming way to talk to ourselves that can help our inner child or inner stress bunny to feel ‘held’ and soothed when anxiety hits.. There are grounding and slowing down things we can say and we can also notice where we may be tending to hold onto our breath or notice the kind of time frame/pressure we may be putting ourselves under or ways we may be over compensating due to complex feelings of being ‘not good or capable enough’.

The human condition may be messy and complex but we don’t have to judge this at all.. We can find ways to accept the chaos or mess that may actually help it to become more ordered or creative.. at least that is what I am beginning to experience in my own life lately as the power of my inner critic hostile to mess begins to ease up on some of its rants.