My Mindfulness story - mick/piedwagtail91

[piedwagtail91]

i'm not sure if my story is still on here somewhere, this is an updated version, bring things right up to date.
My Mindfulness Experience.
please note , this isn't a pleasant story.
I think it’s best if I tell how mindfulness helped me when I’ve been in two similar situations, once shortly after finishing a mindfulness course and then again eighteen months later.
This all started with my accident at work in a joiners shop in 1985 when my hand went into a spindle moulder. I had comparatively minor injuries of broken and badly cut fingers and thumb.
When I went back to work I had anxiety problems, followed by depression, other problems soon followed, as did lots of antidepressants, sleeping pills, psychiatrists and psychologists.
I had two six months spells in a vocational rehabilitation unit but had to resign from my second time there when things started to go badly wrong.
Things didn’t improve or change much until about 2008 when I got 10 sessions of CBT at my health centre.
The CBT helped me a lot, I could see how it worked, though ten sessions wasn’t enough and without the excellent feedback and support that I’d had it was pretty difficult to cope on my own and my mood went sinking back down.
When things levelled out a bit I decided to come off my antidepressants to see what life was like without them or that was the story.
I’d had enough by then and felt coming off them would speed things up and make it easier to kill myself.
I’d pushed everyone away for the same reason. I felt hating everyone including me would make it much easier. No attachment, no problem with worry.
In 2011 after seeing a psychologist that I didn’t like too much and didn’t really work with I went for a CBT assessment. During the assessment I was told that I wasn’t well enough to do CBT but that I should consider Mindfulness instead.
She asked me to Google ‘Mindfulness’ and if I thought it was ok to ring for an assessment.
So I did this and as she didn’t ask me to follow a link the results page was as far as I got. I really didn’t care anymore by then .
I did notice ‘awareness’ and ‘acceptance’ in the Google results and just thought, “yeh be aware that you’re beyond help, accept it and go away and quit bothering us.”
So I rang and went for an assessment. .
I thought it best to just say the right thing and go home.
So they said I could do mindfulness.
I thought that it would be cancelled like most other things had been and decided that when it didn’t work then I’d take 300 antidepressants to kill myself and hoped that people would be able to understand that I’d now tried everything, that nothing had worked and that I couldn’t go on any longer.
So I went over for the first mindfulness session. I expected a note on the door telling me it wasn’t happening.
Much to my surprise it was.
After 20 odd years of talking mainly to psychiatrists and psychologists I was very uncomfortable with all those people around me and tried to block out as many as possible by sitting out of the group and blocking more of them out with the pillar that I sat next to.
It was a difficult two hours.
All I thought on the way home from the first session was “seven more and it’s all over”.
Though I did do all the homework and I did feel in the body scan that it wasn’t relaxation which I hadn’t found helpful because my mind would never clear.
The less said about the raisin practice the better, though I did wonder who it was that needed treatment and where the two leaders carers where.
I went to the second session with the same thoughts, in the same frame of mind.
Part way through this session I felt that I understood how mindfulness worked.
We were doing a walking practice and I’d done something similar myself. Mine was the brutal self-harm version, walking til the pain in my calves stopped me.
This was very gentle but while I was concentrating on my feet taking baby steps I found that all the noise in my head had stopped and it was quiet except for the sensation in my feet.
I went home thinking that maybe they weren’t totally barmy, and maybe it could work for me and maybe I won’t be dead in six weeks or so.
I realised then how wrong I’d been. I felt that I’d wasted two sessions.
Things finally felt like they were going well, but then in session 5 things went wrong.
I had the emotional range of a fag paper and session 5 was a nightmare.
I turned on myself again and the following day I took 100 dothiepin in a bag went up to my favourite place by a reservoir with a great view of Pendle and didn’t expect to go home. I struggled against all the mindfulness I had learnt all the way there.
I messed that up by sitting and listening to the wind in the grass and the birds one last time and ended up in a meditation, by the time I realised the thought of killing myself had gone so I went home.
I hated myself so much for being like I was. I went back to session 6 because I still felt that mindfulness could work, I just avoided what I couldn’t do but always meant to come back to it when I could.
When it came to the final session I finally managing to sit with everyone else, for the first time in a long while I wanted to belong, even if only for one session.
So I left the course having found a few new problems, but I wasn’t seriously thinking of killing myself anymore and I was sure mindfulness would help.
About a week later we went on our summer holiday. I usually ended up with migraine on the long drive home, brought on by 2 adult kids and a crazy dog having the run of the house for a week. This time I used many of the mindfulness practice’s that I’d learned and arrived home feeling ok and pretty pleased with myself, because my mind hadn’t been wandering all over the place.
I felt calm and relaxed AND I didn’t have a migraine.
The Gestapo/DWP had other ideas and had sent their incapacity benefit witch hunt form for me to fill in. It was waiting on the doormat.
I read through it, finding most of the questions either irrelevant or downright insulting and as usual there was nothing at all for mental health problems.
I was already doing everything I could to sort out my life so why the witch hunt?
This is how out of touch millionaires that masquerade as MP’s help people is it?
My mood plummeted and I got a migraine, I took a couple of anti-migraine pills which didn’t work so I went to bed and ended up in tears. I couldn’t cope and couldn’t cope with the thought of another six weeks of a witch hunt.
I remembered that I’d got 100 Dothiepin that hidden in a drawer by the bed, so took them, not expecting to waken up again.
To say I was heartbroken when I threw up is an understatement. I had another 200 Dothiepin downstairs but couldn’t get to them.
I thought of getting these out of the loo, washing them and taking them again but thought if they didn’t kill me then they might make me ill so didn’t.
So I ended up in hospital. I was aware of all the damage Dothiepin can do, that’s why I’d refused to come off it or change it, it was supposed to be my way out.
Whilst I was on the ward I tried a sitting meditation to try to cope with the pain and the still strong thoughts about killing myself, though the stairwells weren’t wide enough to jump off, the windows didn’t open wide enough, the meds were locked away and I couldn’t find anything sharp.
It was a long night. I’d have been stuffed without the mindfulness. The thoughts and disappointment would have been too much; I’d have found some way to finish myself off.
I ended up with the crisis team and then when they discharged me I got some therapy, mainly compassion and something to help with perfectionism. Even before I’d got to the end of the perfectionism work I realised I didn’t want to be a perfectionist anymore and that work still isn’t finished.
After only six months I was feeling better than I’d done in 26 years.
So then my therapist, who is now my mentor, suggested that I might want to be a mindfulness volunteer. This didn’t cause me any of the usual work related emotional problems, and in mid May 2012, only twelve months since the start of my mindfulness course but almost 27 years to the month since my accident, it was all set up.
Since then I’ve trained as a walk leader for the local ‘stepping out ‘ health walks, so that I can get more used to being in the company of other people.
I attended and completed the Mindfulness Teacher Development Course during October and November 2012 where I learned about the teaching side of Mindfulness Therapy.
Part 2
In 2013 the Gestapo and their hit-men at ATOS decided to have another go, same useless form, can you move an empty cardboard box?? Well yeh, so can a gentle breeze. Who writes this rubbish?
Someone out to cause maximum distress and damage to the genuine sick.
So I gathered evidence knowing full well it was working against me, gathering information showed you were fit for work, don’t gather it and they won’t ask. Lose, lose situation.
My depression came back and I decided to download PHQ9 and GAD 7. I felt saying I felt crap didn’t explain a lot and I could also use the scores to send as evidence to the morally bankrupt at ATOS.
My PHQ9 score after a few weeks was 22. My GAD7 was 15.
I felt if I could keep the Gad7 down by meditating and staying mindful I’d be ok.
The depression was something I couldn’t work out what to do with but felt staying mindful and not ruminating might help.
As the weeks went on my scores gradually went up.
I was doing all I could. I was having hand problems, a lot of pain and not much grip and lot of pain when I tried to grip anything.
My close friend who’s read all my therapy and diaries put a lot of effort into helping.
She knew how things worked when I got depressed and asked when would I start pushing her away, when would I start to hate her?
She said it was never going to happen and started dragging me into conversations and keeping me in contact with others.
One day I met someone from a drop in centre and he wanted to talk ATOS and how evil they are. I wasn’t having a good day and was tired. It didn’t help.
When I got home I got 59 naproxen that my doctor had given me for my hand problems and some travel sickness pills and went out to walk to the nearby viaduct.
It didn’t go as planned because I kept meeting up with dog walkers. When I got to the bottom of the viaduct just a few yards from where I planned to end up another dog walker I knew came the other way and offered to walk with me. I was really frustrated but gave up and walked away with him.
When I got home I rang crisis who told me to go to my doctor and get some CBT.
By this time I felt it was best to stop any mindfulness work because I didn’t want to end up hating it, so I stopped but kept walk leading and really didn’t like it.
When I went for the assessment in early July my PHQ9 was 25 and my GAD7 was 20. I wanted to cheat the answers to get them down but what was the point?
This is where I was at, it’s how it was. I was disappointed but accepted it.
When the social worker read me the riot act at the start of the assessment I couldn’t believe I was hearing it.
The last time I’d heard that was on an introduction to counselling course when we played at being counsellors.
I couldn’t believe that I’d got to that state.
On my way home I called at my friends and we talked. She asked what next? So I said the wait for CBT was horrendous and I wanted to start soon but me pushing myself wouldn’t have much effect, I didn’t have the willpower.
She offered to push things and what followed was totally unstructured. She knows my weak points and gradually exploited them, putting me in random difficult situations, some felt like 20 on a 1-10 scale.
I knew I only had to say no and we’d stop, but after being told by her ”you’d do it if it was CBT” it sort of became a game, a difficult one, but I wasn’t going to be outsmarted.
On one occasion it felt like a 30 on the 1-10 scale and I felt a real panic. But when I felt the very intense sensations in my body everything I’d done in therapy came back to me.
Lyra, my compassionate image, was first “See what’s real Mick, these are thoughts” then a ‘thoughts and emotions form’ came to mind. “What can I see, touch, taste, smell, feel, hear” now in this moment?
So I ‘filled in the answers’ and saw what was real, saw that it was just thoughts about what might but was never going to happen and things eased.
While all this was going on, and it was only a matter of a few seconds, I felt that I’d been wrapped by something protective, not a wall or barrier because I didn’t feel cut off, just something protecting me while I saw what was happening, let go of the thoughts and got out of my head and into the sensations in my body. Must have been mindfulness and self-compassion.
That seemed to be a turning point. I’d been filling in thoughts and emotions forms and talking through them with my friend, both for my benefit and hers.
As she was there with this one she said that she noticed straight away when I’d seen what was real, there was a big change in me. Thanks!
I felt it but didn’t realise it was so obvious.
Mindfulness volunteer work started again shortly after.
In early November i was in a good enough place to put on a powerpoint presentation, for the first time ever!, at our teaching course.
Shortly after that and after more help from my friend my scores came down.
By session 2 of teacher training they were both ‘0’. This time I wanted to cheat and get at least a 1 but again that’s how it was so I just accepted it.
I did change my practice to mainly self-compassion when things were at their worst but mindfulness is a big part of self-compassion anyway, it keeps it real.
So I survived, just, with a lot of help and meditation, staying mindful and eventually seeing thoughts as just that.

[FeeHutch]

Wow.
Thank you for sharing so honestly Mick.
I have some experience of the DWP & Atos and really empathised with a lot of what you wrote.

I really think that reading this will help a lot of people who find mindfulness in a similar way so thank you again.

[piedwagtail91]

Thanks fee.
I hope it can help others.
As part of my volunteering I get to tell the story in workshops for cbt trainees and potential mindfulness teachers.
They say it gives them a better understanding of mindfulness.
hopefully it may do the same for those using it as therapy.
I brought it up to date and related more to how mindless has helped this time.

[JonW]

Such an inspirational story, Mick.
Many thanks for sharing.
Cheers, Jon

[Gareth]

Inspirational Mick.

Mindfulness is so powerful that it can be the difference between life and death. I feel compelled to share this wonderful thing - it can help so many.

[piedwagtail91]

thanks gareth and jon. it's there to be shared if you want. a similar older one is on our work mindfulness website

[Gareth]

Your blog is already shared Mick; I will give it an update with your new words soon. Quite cathartic to write it all down and see how far you've come I would imagine.

I was actually talking about mindfulness in general. I feel compelled to share mindfulness in general.

[piedwagtail91]

I'd forgotten that you'd shared it.
I left Twitter in protest over something that I've also forgotten:-)
so I'm a bit out of touch now.
May have to rejoin to keep up to speed:-)