Tag: empath

Living With Someone Who Is Mentally Ill: Interview with My Daughter

On By spaige08In Advocacy, anxiety, depression, hospitalization, medication, mental health, Mother, parenting, postpartum, stigma, Uncategorized, writing, Youth Mental Health2 Comments

My daughter has seen it all. From her oceanic blue eyes in her cherub baby face to now, almost 12 years later. She is a remarkable child who has not only witnessed her mother’s hysterics (& panic attacks, drastic weight loss and days of not getting out of bed) but also her own diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. My daughter, given the name Sophia Faye at birth, is the epitome of the meaning… “Wise Fairy”. Sophia is an old soul and understands so much for such a young person. Many words can be used to describe her but at the top of the list are definitely compassionate, empathetic, caring and loving. There are days I may miss her little toddling body and cheeky grins but I love watching her blossom into the amazing young lady she is today.

When I decided to do this interview series, I knew I had to interview her. I have not hid much from her. In fact 3 years ago I was so foregone I couldn’t. She learned about suicide at the tender age of 8 and questioned me often about it. She knows I grew to hate her as a newborn. I’ve always explained things to her in an age appropriate manner and often worried about her reactions but she has always listened, digested and never ever judged. I am amazed by her and couldn’t of asked for a better child.

Sophia’s Interview

Lounging in her preteen abode full of textured pillows and dozens of Stitch stuffed animals early in the evening, we both relaxed on her bed. There were many giggles beforehand as she pictured this interview as a video recording and not just a vocal recording. She was a little nervous, as was I, and we both tend to laugh a lot when we are nervous:

Me: How did you feel when I told you I grew to hate you when you were a baby?

Sophia: Fine.

Me: How come you were okay with it?

Sophia: Because I knew you didn’t mean it.

Concerning 3 years ago

Me: What did you feel and think when I left the house 3 years ago to stay with Bubbe & Grandpa (my parents) because Tyler (former foster son) was triggering me?

Sophia: I don’t remember that.

Me: It was only 3 years ago!

Sophia: Didn’t I come with you?

Me: You did.

Sophia: It was when he left?

Me: Yes.

Sophia: Oh, I mean, I was… I didn’t even notice anything was wrong with you. Like, I… I don’t really know. I felt fine because I didn’t know you were triggered.

Me: I left the house because I couldn’t stay there.

Sophia: But wasn’t I there too?

Me: I don’t think you came the first night.

Sophia: Oh. I don’t remember. I’m getting old!

Me (after rolling my eyes at that last statement): How did you feel when I admitted myself into the hospital?

Sophia: Scared.

Me: Did you know why I was there?

Sophia: No, I’m not sure. No.

Me: What did you think when you couldn’t visit me in the hospital and had to stay in the cafeteria with Grandpa?

Sophia: I wasn’t happy about it. I mean, I wanted to see you.

Me: You weren’t allowed to see me because they were worried about what the other people might say to you, what you might see.

Sophia: Oh, okay.

Me: Were you scared when I was released from the hospital?

Sophia: No, because I was happy you were going to leave and come home.

Me: You’ve been protecting me since the hospital stay. How come?

Sophia: Because I don’t want you to go back to the hospital.

GAD, PPD, Depression, & Suicide

Me: Do you blame me for your Generalized Anxiety Disorder and it is okay if you do?

Sophia: No.

Me: Do you blame anyone for it?

Sophia: No. Why would I?

Me: Do you wish you were ‘normal’?

Sophia: Sometimes.

Me: If you didn’t worry about the things you worry about?

Sophia: Sometimes, because sometimes it is good to worry.

Me: Do you fear you’ll have Postpartum Depression and Anxiety because I had it?

Sophia: Sometimes.

Me: Do you worry or fear you’ll have a Depressive Disorder because I have one?

Sophia: I don’t usually think about it. I guess, but that is only when I think about it.

Me: Do you know when I was first diagnosed (with Depression)?

Sophia: You were 14.

Me: And how old are you?

Sophia: I am 11.

Me: So you are close to that age.

Sophia: Yeah.

Me: That’s why I watch you a lot.

Sophia: That’s not creepy.

Me: Not in that sense Sophia. I’m not stalking you… Are you worried I will commit suicide?

Sophia: Very much.

Me: How come?

Sophia: You told me how you took that can cutter thing (a case cutter) and almost cut your hand off (almost slit my wrist).

Me: I was 18 then.

Sophia: So?

Me: That was 20 years ago.

Sophia: You also said that if you go off of medicine you’re probably going to want to commit suicide the next time you have an episode (of Major Depressive Disorder).

Me: Are you worried I will hurt myself?

Sophia: Yeah.

Me: Do you think there will be a next time?

Sophia: Yes, just because of events that can happen in the future.

Me: Like what?

Sophia: Like Bubbe & Grandpa dying or like the kitties dying and stuff.

Me: Do you think because of what I have been through that I am too overprotective with you about Mental Illness?

Sophia: Sometimes. There is no reason you should be.

Me: Do you understand why I am?

Sophia: Yeah. Because you don’t want me to get Depression and stuff.

Stigma & Advocacy

Me: What have I told you about stigma?

Sophia: What does stigma mean again?

Me: Hard to define but how people think the Mentally Ill are a danger to our society, that you should be hush-hush about it because people may not hire you, people may not want to be your friend, people don’t believe it is real.

Sophia: You’ve told me.

Me: And what do you think about that?

Sophia: I mean if that’s what they think, that’s what they think.

Me: Because you know that one of your grandparents thinks that way.

Sophia: Well, yeah, but…

Me: How do you feel knowing that you have Generalized Anxiety Disorder and you have a grandparent that doesn’t believe it exists?

Sophia: Well, that’s what he can think.

Me: Do you understand why I advocate for this?

Sophia: What does that mean, advocate?

Me: Why I share my story. Why I try to teach others.

Sophia: Yes.

Me: Do you see yourself doing that?

Sophia: I don’t know.

Thoughts on Me, Her Mom

Me: Do you think I am a bad mother?

Sophia: No. Not at all. Why would I think you were?

Me: Do you ever wish you had a mother that wasn’t like this?

Sophia: No.

Me: Did you ever think I was a bad mother?

Sophia: No.

Me: How do you characterize your mother?

Sophia: Worried, anxious, fun, caring, loving, sometimes depressed.

Me: Do you always related Mental Illness stuff to your mom?

Sophia: Like different things other than Postpartum?

Me: Well I have had Depression since I was 14. There have been others thrown in there.

Sophia: When I think of Depression I don’t think of you as ‘Oh, she’s depressed’, I think ‘she is still alive and she is strong’.

Me: You see me as strong and a fighter?

Sophia: Yeah.

Me: What traits do you hope you get from me or do you see you already have gotten?

Sophia: I want to get your determination and your strength and sometimes your empathy because a lot of times empathy is good and I want your mental strength.

Me: Any last comments on me, your mother?

Sophia: I love her.

Me: Would you want any other mother besides me?

Sophia: No.

Me: How much do you love me?

Sophia: To infinity and beyond!

I am truly grateful for this kid!

Reflecting On My Uncle’s Death

On By spaige08In death, depression, relatives, Uncategorized, writing1 Comment

My uncle died last Sunday. I do not ask for your sympathies but instead offer you to bestow them to my aunt, cousins (both his children & grandchildren, and his brothers (my father and my other uncle). They are the ones who knew him well. I did not. Like his parents, my grandparents, I barely knew who he really was.

I attended his funeral service yesterday morning. I did not expect to feel much. I am not saying this to be cruel, but more to define the relationship I had with him. As I said, I didn’t know him well. All interactions I had with him were not loving but more sarcastic in nature. Then again, all of us Bergers are sarcastic beings (just ask my husband). As this is a way I express my love often, I now realize that this is probably how he expressed his admiration to his extended family and friends.

While at the service I found out things I never knew about him. He was a Yeoman in the Navy. He was the administrative assistant to none other than then naval officer and famous astronaut, Alan Shepard! He contributed to a music magazine and local TV station and in his 3rd career, he helped families navigate Social Services. I was amazed by this and admired all that he had become.

When I woke up the morning of his funeral, I did not expect to shed tears. I did not expect to feel melancholic. I did not expect my life that day to proceed much differently that most days. I drove to the synagogue, placed the black lace doily on my head and proceeded into the shul. I then found myself hugging every one of my relatives. A family reunion of sorts, one I wished was had on a more positive note. Upon each hug, I felt their tears. I felt their sadness. I felt their emptiness and absorbed it all. I sat through the service, laughing a bit here and there as my cousin’s husband spoke about him. And when it was over I said my farewells, hugged my parents and went off to work.

I thought I would be okay. I thought I would walk at lunch. I thought I would participate in the Zumba Class after work.

I was wrong.

I am an Empath and upon absorbing my mourning relatives emotions, my emotions were released. I do not mean this in a selfish tone, just more as a bit of a background into how I function. I was empty, constantly wondering why I was driving to work and not home or to the cemetery service 2 states away. I moved slowly as if I had to trudge through mud. I wanted to be alone, hide away from the world and sit with my emotions.

What were these emotions though? Was it just the feelings I had absorbed? Was it more?

Since his death a few days ago, I had thought more about mortality. In fact, I probably dwelled on it a bit too much. I logically know we are all mortal, dying from the day we are born (did I mention I am somewhat of a pessimist?!)… but when there is a death in the family, a death of someone you have known all your life, someone only a few years older than your parents, you tend to think of what is yet to come. My uncle was 8 years older than my father and roughly the same age my grandfather (his father) was when he passed away. There is a reality that my time with them is gradually decreasing.

But it isn’t just my parents mortality I am thinking about. I am thinking about my own. I will not be here forever. How will my daughter handle that? How will my husband handle that? I have come close with death a few times because of my Depression and I always say that my next episode with Major Depressive Disorder will probably kill me. Of course I am taking precautions to prevent a next episode as I will remain medicated and in therapy.

But, I cannot sit with these emotions forever. The Empath’s necessity in life is to learn to let go of the feelings and emotions before they become your own. So I took yesterday as a day to sit with them, to understand them, to embrace them (and drink with them as yesterday was a 2-glasses-of-wine day). When I went to bed, I let them go.

To my Uncle C : May you rest in peace. May you sing infinitely with Roy Orbison, Tom Petty & Elvis Presley like you used to with my father and my uncle B. May you sit and binge watch VHS movies on an old sofa in front of a tube TV. May you tell Elijah to come quickly and drink his wine at the Passover Seder before we all freeze due to our cold New England temps. May you watch over my aunt as she grieves for you and remind her you are still around. May you stay, as Bob Dylan says, forever young.

What My Daughter Knows

On By spaige08In anxiety, depression, hospitalization, mental health, parenting, postpartum, stigma2 Comments

My daughter knows I hated her just two weeks after she was born. Pure hatred, where using the actual word ‘hate’ is valid and not taboo. She knows I wanted to leave her and never ever see her again. She knows I wanted to turn back time and never have her, completely obliterate her existence.

My daughter knows what suicide is. She learned this at age 8 because she overheard something on the radio. She knows that I have thought about committing suicide a handful of times and that one of those times I came very close to slitting my wrist with a case cutter I stole from work (and still have). She knows I was a teenager then, almost 18, a legal adult, only 8 years older than she is now. She knows that these ideations have blown into my mind like a breeze and have quickly left several times in the last twenty years.

My daughter knows I am sick. She has seen me at my worst, a vision I never wanted her to lay eyes on. She has seen me shaking, rocking back and forth, nails digging into my head spewing delusions out of my mouth left and right. She has seen the tears, witnessed the dry-heaving runs to the toilet, heard my self-loathing.

My daughter knows I have been hospitalized, twice. She accompanied my parents this latest time when they visited me, being forced to stay in the cafeteria with my father because she was deemed ‘too young’ for the short term psychiatric ward. The hospital feared the patients there would hurt or scare her by saying or doing something. This means they feared I would hurt or scare her too. She knows the emotional pain one feels when the only communication we had was through a phone… a phone that would cut you off if you moved wrong, a phone so desperate in need of replacement. She understands that the hospital is my safe place, when our home is unable to be just that.

My daughter knows she is an Only child because of me. She knows I was barely able to raise her in the beginning due to Severe Postpartum Depression and Anxiety. She knows at times I have been unable to care for her in the episodes of Major Depressive Disorder since. She knows that she lost her little brother, my beloved former foster son, because my illnesses prevented me from being able to function, let alone parent. I became a third child for my husband then, a childlike creature in an adult body that my daughter started to take care of, becoming a Mommy to her own mother.

What I didn’t expect for  this wonderful, kind, and loving child to learn was acceptance. Every time I had to explain these things, every time I hurt her, I expected anger and rage in return. I expected her to ignore me, shout “I hate you Mommy”, rotating the knife deeper into my back.  I expected extreme tears over losing her brother, many more than she shed (and she cried quite a bit).

Instead, she shocked me by becoming my protector of sorts, a role I never asked her to take and tell her now she can relinquish.  She truly cares if something will affect me, triggering me back to those dark dismal days.  She has true compassion and empathy, two traits I am happy she learned, although I wish she learned them with something other than me as the subject.  She is the Wise Fairy that her name, Sophia Faye, connotes.

There are so many things she has had to learn at the tender age of 8, 9 and now 10.  These things I would have liked to have postponed.  I have been called out by a select few saying she was too young for these strong topics.  Yes, I know.  But, I have to say, if by telling her about being mentally ill, suicidal & hospitalized has made her into the awesome kid that she is today, I am happy she knows.  I am happy she knows, because she won’t have to live in the shame and stigma of it if it happens to her.  She knows she has a loving mother who has been through hell and back that can help her.  And she knows that although at one point I hated her, wanting to leave, I couldn’t bare to live without her now.  She is my heart, my strength, my love, my Sophia Faye.

I Am An Empath…

On By spaige08In UncategorizedLeave a comment

When I close my eyes, I am being pulled deep underwater, my leg in the clenches of an alligator’s tightly gripped mouth.  I am screaming, wailing, crying for help, clueless of what is going on.  I am waiting to be saved by my Mommy and Daddy, waiting to see their faces and feel their warm embrace.  A few days later, they find my body.

This vision has been with me since I first read about the two year old little boy who was enjoying his Disney vacation with his mother, father and older sister while watching the evening movie on the beach at the water’s edge of the Seven Seas Lagoon at the Grand Floridian.  My family was staying there just two months ago.  I walked past that spot several times during that vacation.  A vacation that was to us the most “Happiest Place On Earth”.

I have no blame for this incident.  The media has already developed enough with the child who fell into the gorilla enclosure at a zoo and now this.  I do not for one single minute blame the parents for not watching their child.  He was close by dipping his feet at the water’s edge.  He was right near them.  Although alligators are common in Florida, I do not blame Disney for not foreseeing an alligator coming into a man-made Lagoon.  There is no blame here…

There are tears.  Lots of tears.  Inside my head, for the last few days, I’ve been crying non stop for this little boy.  I’ve been imagining what he may have gone through and as a mother, I have been trying to take his pain and place it on me.  I have put myself in his parents’ shoes and tried to live the grief they are going through, the blame they probably put on themselves, the guilt.  I very well know this is not my job.  I cannot carry the pain of everyone on this planet.  Most times, my own pain is too much.  Yet I do, or at least I try and I don’t know how to stop and I don’t think I want to.

Along with this little boy, the innocent lives of those 49 people that were lost at the nightclub just a few days prior because of an assassin with his own internal struggles, swim inside my head.  I try to carry their pain and their families’ pain.  I imagine how that scene played out.  I cry at the vision.

And it doesn’t end there.  I am once again thrown into the loss of my foster son.  Thinking of him everyday, I am somehow envisioning him being dragged down with the alligator, but I am that alligator.  When I am lucid, I know this is not true.  I know I helped him along with my husband and daughter in so many ways in those two months but because of what I was going through, I imagine he saw things that scared him.  I only hope he was young enough he never remembers them.

I am an Empath.  I am “…affected by other people’s energies, and have an innate ability to intuitively feel and perceive others… You are always open, so to speak, to process other people’s feelings and energy, which means that you really feel, and in many cases take on the emotions of others (themindunleashed.org)”.  I am now facing this on a larger scale, trying to take on the emotions of all those who perished and their families, a large population all at once.

For me, I am at that point that if I let it continue, I may be dragged down into that dark place I have just recently left, another episode of Major Depression.  All these emotions, sadness, helplessness, guilt that these families must be feeling… pain, fear, loss that those who died were feeling.  If I do not somehow quell them, Depression will take me again and turn those emotions onto me.  I fear this.  I have not completely healed from episode six.  What would happen to me?

But I can’t stop.  I can’t stop feeling.  I can’t stop going into a room and knowing if the atmosphere is a happy one or one full of tension.  I can’t stop seeing my friends go through a hard time and not feeling anything for them.  I can’t stop wanting to hold all those who are grieving.  I am programmed this way.

I am an Empath, a common trait amongst those who are Mentally Ill.  I am highly emotional and tend to absorb feelings of those around me and those I’ve never met.  I feel everything.  Although at times, this affects me to a threatening point, I am glad I am an Empath.  This world needs more people who have empathy.  The more empathy in this world, the less these tragic events occur.  For now, I will try to focus my energies somewhere else with therapy, medication, walking, reading, cuddling with my daughter, anything that will make me happy and focus my mind somewhere else.

To find out more on being and Empath, please read this article:  Top 10 Traits of an Empath

I fit each and every one of them.