What coping skills do you find helpful? When you get to the point where you are imobilized, where you have boxed up your things because you can't even remember why you wanted them in the first place. Where you overtake your medicine so that you sleep 20 hours a day. Where you find it replusive to be around anyone at all. Where you just don't want your pets anymore and you can't even imagine wanting to want then ever again. Where you wander around the house thinking what an empty shell.

I don't allow myself to get to that point because when I did it ended up with my child in foster care for a year while both him and I enter therapy and family therapy. Then when he came home he came home violent resulting in his being removed from home to go through residential treatment programs.

I know I didn't cause his violence that is a result of having schizophrenia. But watching me go down and experiencing a parent at that level of depression cenrtainly did not help his problems but instead may be and probably is a part of why he also has PTSD, trouble trusting other people and so on.

Thanks to therapy, three years of medication and a good depression management class I am now able to catch my depression well before it reaches this point.

1. i nap for two or three hours.

2. i read.

3. i cook, even if i know i won't eat it and i give it to my neighbors.

4. i go outside and take care of my flowers.

5. tonight i had something new to do, i went outside and built a fire in my new firepit and sat for one and a half hours, watching the flames and petting the animals. the owl didn't call, but i have hopes that he/she will be out later.

6. i visit Thelma and Louise, my hens, and i feed them the special grass that i have to hunt for........and they talk to me and make me feel better.

xoxoxo pat

Thank you...
I think that some of us can "not" let ourselves "get" to that point but some of us can't. Due to a different set of circumstances this year I have. I feel for the first time that I have nowhere to turn, the real difference in my feelings this year than other years.

I don't have children at home so they are not at "risk". I keep my feelings from my best friend because it upsets her and she is having surgery next week.

My adult son would in no way be able to cope with how I feel and I have always kept it from him. One of reasons why I developed an eating disorder (I ate my feelings).

So my "hat" is off to one and all that can manage their symptoms to keep them from the point where mine have gotten too. Mine have never been worse.

Sincerely, Freewill

[beckyb342]

yeah reading is good so is gardening,watching tv,listening to music,journaling,exercising.reading and listening to muic is what help me.mostly listening to music.