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Just Sara A Bouquet for Pearls - share your appreciation for other members
  • replies: 715

Every now and then, members share a beautiful Pearl of Wisdom. How often do you think to yourself; "OMG that's great! I wish everyone could see this." Presenting someone with a bunch of flowers is a generous way of acknowledging their insightful word... View more

Every now and then, members share a beautiful Pearl of Wisdom. How often do you think to yourself; "OMG that's great! I wish everyone could see this." Presenting someone with a bunch of flowers is a generous way of acknowledging their insightful words. I hope this thread stays active through members giving out praise regularly to people they feel deserving, and therefore keep generosity of spirit alive within the pages of BeyondBlue Forum. My bunch of Red Roses (my choice) goes to Wishful for the following sentence; 'Personally, I see no reason to be praised in me, but I'm learning that seeing through the eyes of others can be more accurate!!' I so hear you Wishful. Just beautiful... Try to keep your leading comments short to focus on 'their' words. Choose specific flowers (or a gift if you like) to present to them. Sign off respectfully and sincerely. I hope this takes off... Spreading the love...Sara

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Rose1920 Talking to a loved one can help
  • replies: 1

I've been like this for as long as I can remember. I grew up with abuse and divorce , my dad leaving us and making a new family, and an over powering mother who's idea of parenting was that similar to how a warden treats a prisoner. I always thought ... View more

I've been like this for as long as I can remember. I grew up with abuse and divorce , my dad leaving us and making a new family, and an over powering mother who's idea of parenting was that similar to how a warden treats a prisoner. I always thought that considering all the things ive been through that I was fairly normal. Never felt like I was depressed. But there was always something different about me and I just thought everybody was like that. It wasn't until two years ago that I realised I had anxiety. I get frequent panic attacks, tight chest. Pains in the chest, shaking and all the symptoms you could think of. I'm scared of everything. I have a very small comfort zone so when I'm outside of that I get scared. Simple things as going to the hairdresser I get anxious. I have a big fear of death. And when I walk down the street I'm scared that everything will kill me. A tree will fall on my head or a car will crash into me. The "bogey monster still lives under my bed": that's how bad i am. I have had my boyfriend for 3 years now and I can tell you that his support has been phenomenal. There are times where I push him away during my anxious times but he sticks by me. Since having him and someone to talk to my symptoms have lowered. I have less panic attacks, and I'm not as afraid as I was. I still have a lot of work to do. He is the only person that knows of my anxiety and I'm worried I've put too much pressure on him. I fear of telling people as I have always been the "happy" girl and I don't want people to think of me as anything else. I want our relationship to work so that is my motivation to get this anxiety the hell out of my system so I can live a fear free ,panic free ,full life. Sorry it's so long but my objective of this was to express my life with anxiety and to show that talking to a loved one can impact very positively on your battle

Mark_098 Isn't it funny...
  • replies: 2

Isn't it funny, when life's little annoying things have a habit of turning out just the way you want? I just got a new job after 3 months of bugger all work and now I couldn't be happier. All I can say is it's about bl#%$y time. two years from now, T... View more

Isn't it funny, when life's little annoying things have a habit of turning out just the way you want? I just got a new job after 3 months of bugger all work and now I couldn't be happier. All I can say is it's about bl#%$y time. two years from now, Tasmania here I come.

Sheiknah Hope
  • replies: 2

I heard this song on the radio today driving home from an appointment and it really spoke to me and brought me hope. I had just had an appointment with someone that was going to help me work through the issues that have brought me down. I really felt... View more

I heard this song on the radio today driving home from an appointment and it really spoke to me and brought me hope. I had just had an appointment with someone that was going to help me work through the issues that have brought me down. I really felt God speak to me through it. Weather you believe in God or not I am sure and hope this brings you hope too. A few words of the song need to be tweaked but you get the message !! Please cut and paste the link below. May we all break free of the chains . . with love . . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JV53NoB5cg

mandyjk esteem game
  • replies: 8

Hi my name is mandy and i have a challenge for anyone interested. My game starts with using the alphabet - A,B,C etc. put in place the sentence I AM ___________ and using the first letter A think of as many possible positive words to describe yoursel... View more

Hi my name is mandy and i have a challenge for anyone interested. My game starts with using the alphabet - A,B,C etc. put in place the sentence I AM ___________ and using the first letter A think of as many possible positive words to describe yourself. eg. I am Amazing. I am angelic. I am articulate. Then move on to the letter B. eg I am Beautiful. I am Brave etc. I can guarantee that you will have a smile on your face fairly quickly particularly if you use positive words and say them with enthusiasm. You can joke around with funny words but the most impact will be felt from positive words.I challenge you to try the positive words first and if you dont think they work see how you feel after using negative ones. More than likely not very good. So please stay with positive words and you can play any time of the day or night, standing or sitting. Have fun, keep smiling and shining.

Night_Blakey What do you say to a friend?
  • replies: 5

Hello, I'm new so please bear with me. Recently a friend of mine attempted to end his own life. You see he has been down for a while, and we'd talked him into seeing a psychologist. Unfortunately he'd been too uncomfortable to talk to his psychologis... View more

Hello, I'm new so please bear with me. Recently a friend of mine attempted to end his own life. You see he has been down for a while, and we'd talked him into seeing a psychologist. Unfortunately he'd been too uncomfortable to talk to his psychologist about these issues and kept it hidden. So we are going to go see him in hospital tomorrow and I don't really know what to say to him. I was wondering if anyone had a similar experience or advice to give.

Dennis38 A little long but hope this helps someone
  • replies: 7

Like a lot of people here I have good days and I have some really dark days, since this is the very first post I have made on this forum I will share a little about myself. At the age of 24 my life became a living hell, on January 4th 2000 I was walk... View more

Like a lot of people here I have good days and I have some really dark days, since this is the very first post I have made on this forum I will share a little about myself. At the age of 24 my life became a living hell, on January 4th 2000 I was walking home due to my car blowing its fly wheel, when this happened the engine revved rather high since basically the car was dropped into neutral and my foot was on the floor-this is kind of important information for better understanding of me- so I parked the car at the side of a busy interstate and started to walk home, was raining a bit and it was cold, long story short I was ten miles from my home when some lady was doing about 104 km (or 65 mph which ever you prefer) on a wet road that you shouldn't even be doing 60km (40 mph) on she lost control of her car and ran me over. Now do keep in mind this was in the USA where this happened. She said I saw her and tried to run out of the way, personally I don't even remember seeing her coming just remember passing a factory I use to work at and then waking up in more pain than I ever thought humanly possible. Come to find out my left leg was shattered in 12 places, my right knee blown totally out, had a broke left shoulder blade that the doctors missed, as they said they had more life threaten injuries to deal with then a little broken shoulder, bruised lung and kidney. I was in the hospital for two and half weeks, I remember about four days if that. Then stuck in bed for three months only able to get up and move around via wheel chair and that was only for a few minutes if I was lucky. And I found that I was truly once again dependent on my parents and my little sister. I lost a lot of things in that accident that I still haven't been able to get back and it's been 13 years now. I had to learn to walk again which took me 8 months when the doctors said it would be at least a year and half before I would be out of the wheel chair permanently. My job fired me three days after my accident quoting that I could no longer physically do my job. All of my so called friends just disappeared after the accident. All I got out of the settlement was just a little over 14k with over 250k in hospital bills all in my name. The lady that hit me walked way scot free not even a speeding ticket. Heck I never even got a card or anything from her to even say "oops sorry for turning you into a hood ornament." My own mother stole a lot of my disability checks while I was in so much pain I couldn't see straight, you see I went from two and half weeks of a pain killer in the hospital to only a week's worth of the medication when I got home. Because the doctors didn't want me to get hooked on anything. So I had to rely on over the counter pain killers and developed a much higher pain threshold. I went into a very dark hole after that car accident and stayed there a long time as well, when people say well once you hit bottom the only place to go is up, they are wrong I set up an oil drill and started drilling even deeper. After about a year and half after the accident I was up and walking again on two crutches and had no choice but to re-educate myself because I could no longer work in a factory like I use to. My mother cleared my bank account out without me knowing it, I was still sore a lot and not thinking straight and simply thought I had misplaced my check book, come to find out my mother stole my check book wrote 5 checks that cleared my account out of the last 900 dollars I had, I found this out when I wrote a 900 dollar check to the tech school I was attending and the check bounced though the roof. I was nearly thrown in jail over this later on because in Georgia you do not write bad checks that's almost worse than killing someone in that part of the country. After everything that had happened to me I was still in a very very dark hole, I always joke that my life at that time had become either a badly written soap opera or a great number one country western song, all that was missing was for my dog to bite me then die. The only reason that I did not kill myself during those dark times was my sense of humour. I have a dark sense of humour and it has saved me more times than I can count. For a while I thought I was doing ok until one day I snapped. I was in my dad's car and had gone to the movies, I had a really bad case of cabin fear that day and just had to get out of the house even though I knew that there was something wrong in my head on that day. Well on the way home I had a break down and for the very first time I gave suicide a true thought, the ONLY two things that stopped me was the thought of what my girlfriend would think, you see I meet my now wife over the internet and we had hit it off pretty good heck the very first time we were going to talk was the day of my car accident, you see she was in Australia and I was in the states so we had never actually met. On that day when I got home that was when I realized that I was not handling things as well as I thought I was, it was the first time I was truly scared of myself. So I called the mental health centre in Georgia and the lady I got was really helpful and pointed me in the right direction of getting some professional help. Now for some reason there is a huge stigma of a guy going to get help, I mean at an early age we are taught not to cry, not to show emotions only girls do that. Mind you a good chunk of my child hood is missing thanks to long term and short term memory problems. The councillor that I finally chose really helped me out, I went on medication for about 6 to 8 months before I pulled myself off it, basically while I was on medication you could have beat me, and robbed me and I would have just shrugged my shoulders and said oh well. The medication gave me the middle ground that I needed before I was on it my moods would swing super high or super low and there were never days of just middle ground. But I got tired of not feeling. There is no shame in taking medication to give you that middle ground that we all need. I have found out that though this accident there are good things and bad things, the good things are that A: I got to fly out and meet my girlfriend for the very first time thanks to what little settlement money I had left after my lawyer and family took off me, mind you I did fly out on 9-11 my plane was one of the last ones to leave the states at the time. I now hold two higher degree's of education a BS in computer networking a Masters of Information systems and I am now going after an MBA with a concentration in marketing, which none of this would have been possible without being run over as I would not have had the time nor the money to go and meet my future wife, we are now going on 5 years, and I made to much money to get any kind of student loan. I have good days and bad days still, if I hear an engine revving it will make my hair stand on end and I will have to fight myself so that I do not curl into a ball, wet myself and suck my thumb! I still have days that for no reason I am really nervous or highly anxious. But on those days I know what will trigger me and I even warn my wife that I am "flighty" it's the best way I can describe it to her. So when I am in a "flighty" mood I try to avoid my triggers, which basically is anything that can make me laugh or cry. I try and keep myself on some kind of middle ground, doesn't always work but at least I know its coming. Some times that half the battle simply knowing that you are going to tail spin, because just maybe you can control how fast you spin, you may not be able to stop it but you can slow it down and control the size of crater you leave behind. I mean even writing this makes me feel a bit depressed but some things that do help is to look back and see the good that has come into your life, even though it might be a small thing that small thing is all that takes to help lift you up a little. The one thing I will remember to my dying day is how a simple smile, I know corny, pulled me up a little. I was laying in the hospital bed, in more pain than I thought I could stand, as the pain killers were not doing a dang thing to ease the pain off as they had worn off and the doctors only had me on a small amount of pain medication every four hours, the pain medication would last in my system for maybe a half hour if I was lucky then I had three and half hours of pure hell to endure. But one of the twenty doctors that had put me back together came in with a bunch of orderlies to show them what a great job they had done. I was at the lowest point in my life, when I looked up at her and saw her smile down at me it's hard to explain but that one smile was like, yeah I know you are hurting but someone still cares. I am still fighting the depression and the anxiety and get very jumpy when having to try and go out and find a job, kind of waiting for the other boot to fall kind of thing, it's a little dumb I know but it's the way my brain works and it's just wondering what horrible thing will happen next. For the most part I am fighting those feelings and looking for a job, I mean 13 years without a job really sucks. Thankfully my wife is standing beside me though I cannot show her everything that is going on as she cannot handle it and will break down beside me. After all she says I am her rock and no one wants to know their rock is on faulty ground. But she does support me and tells me not to say that I am being stupid as some of it I can't control. Never let yourself feel that you are alone, you can find people that will sit back and listen and the beautiful thing about getting professional help is you do not have to worry about them "judging you"! I mean they are perfect strangers and so what if they do judge you, you only have to see them when you need to and it's not like you will be running into them every day of your life. The best advice I can give is learn about yourself, find what your triggers are because even when we have a "good day" we know that monster is in us waiting to drag us down, so on the days you feel yourself sliding try and avoid your triggers, or find a trigger that you know might help slow your slide a bit, if that is painting, reading a book, losing yourself in a video game for an hour or so, than do that. But whatever you do, don't just sit there doing nothing it's up to each of us to fight that demon, but remember we can't do it alone sometimes so even if it's just talking on this forum get on the forum and talk you will find someone that understands and won't tell you "well it could be worse" because we all know we do NOT want to think about how it could be worse!! And if anyone has any idea how to get yourself motivated please let me know as that is one of the greatest things I am still fighting with is how to get myself motivated to simply go back out into the world. Because I know I am using my education as a barrier or a buffer, some days it gives me an "excuse" not to go out and fill out a job application kind of thing. Hell fire I am still having days where I can't even get myself out the front door without fighting myself. But I still keep moving forward or at least I am trying to.

PunchMeIBleed Almost there...
  • replies: 4

I'm in the middle of coming off of my medication. I've been taking anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication for almost eight years now. I've got to say...it's been really really hard. My husband has given me a lot of encouragement and support, it was ... View more

I'm in the middle of coming off of my medication. I've been taking anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication for almost eight years now. I've got to say...it's been really really hard. My husband has given me a lot of encouragement and support, it was him who originally suggested that I stop taking them. A couple of months ago he managed to stop taking anti depressants himself. I'd been feeling more happy than I'd ever remember feeling, I was happy more often than not. Spoke to my doctor about it, she said she was happy for me to try and come off of them. I took the recommended method of halving the dosage & eventually stopping over a month. Three days off of the medication entirely and BAM. I started shaking, feeling really dizzy, it felt like I could pass out at any moment. Things got worse when I found out my doctor wasn't available for me to see till the next day. Started hyperventilating. I walked to the chemist hoping they might have something over the counter that would help with the dizziness, the lady was so nice, she sat me down, took my blood pressure and got me to drink a lot of water. She wouldn't let me walk home (she was worried that if I passed out I would hit my head). My parents luckily live in the same city & my Dad is retired. I called him & asked if he could take me to a doctor. Feeling worse than before, the hyperventilation had worsened and I needed to hold onto his arm so I could walk. We ended up going to Emergency, the nurse was getting angry at me because I was having so much trouble regulating my breathing. After waiting for what felt like forever I was finally seen by a doctor. He was really lovely & asked one of the mental health specialists to drop by my bed & talk to me. He said that I had the most happy disposition he had ever seen & reassured me that I could come off of the medication (holding out for a few days longer or going back on them & weaning off more slowly). Since then I've been much more slowly decreasing my dosage, now taking one day on, one day off. But...I feel so shit on the day I'm off. I've been tempted to self harm again (I haven't hurt myself in just over a year now). I want so badly for this to work. I don't want to be on this medication any more but it's been just so challenging. I have a supporting, caring and loving husband, I love my job; but I just feel so overwhelmed. I just needed to write this all down, it's all really getting to me...

Joe_Roberts Quitting Smoking
  • replies: 3

I'm not saying this will work for you, but it worked for me. I smoked up to fifty cigarettes a day for thirty odd years. I wanted to quit, but the problem in my honest opinion was everyone said it was so hard to quit. You had to use nicotine patches,... View more

I'm not saying this will work for you, but it worked for me. I smoked up to fifty cigarettes a day for thirty odd years. I wanted to quit, but the problem in my honest opinion was everyone said it was so hard to quit. You had to use nicotine patches, chew nicotine gum, or get a prescription. None of these things appealed to me. Nicotine Replacement Therapy? How's that supposed to work? If I told you I drank two bottles of hard spirits a day, would you tell me to cut down my drinking by switching to beer? I might even try that, if you supplied the beer ... The problem arises when addiction is viewed as a disease. It isn't. Addiction is a matter of choice. All right, it's a series of bad choices if you like, but choice still isn't disease. OK, in my case, I had, for reasons best known to myself, chosen to pay a tobacco company to kill me. As long as that remained my choice, there wasn't much outside of death that would make me quit smoking. When that was no longer my choice, if I remember rightly, I simply shoved my cigarettes in a cupboard. They are still there. Why? Basically, "Waste not, want not!" If I'm out somewhere and I think to myself, "I'll have to go buy a packet of smokes," another thought occurs to me, and that's this, "Don't be stupid, you've got a packet sitting in a cupboard!" That's true, and it's also true I could smoke the bloody lot right now if I wanted, but it's not how I would feel before I smoked any of them, it's how I'd feel afterwards! Regards, Joe

The_Real_David_Charles Positive Role Models - do they help ?
  • replies: 5

That old thing where a depressed or otherwise mental health sufferer is told to "look at" how someone more positive and successful lives (despite having similar health problems) by way of being a Postive Role Model. Does it really inspire or help ? A... View more

That old thing where a depressed or otherwise mental health sufferer is told to "look at" how someone more positive and successful lives (despite having similar health problems) by way of being a Postive Role Model. Does it really inspire or help ? A quick example might help: there's a Christian type person who has proven that adversities need not prevent a limitless life. His name is Nick Vujicic. He's a quadraplegic. And he loves life so much he inspires. All with a dash of hope, confidence, courage, etc. Does all this "sharing" of a great attitude and the various publications handling topics like faith, personal crisis, relationships, job challenges, anger, finding balance and,of course, the one we had to have - the power of the dream - really embrace others, like us, that suffer discomfort, diagnosis and depressive "choices" ? 'Cos sometimes, such positivity, is a bit much. We recoil from the light. Hoping for some discussion - maybe past the no. 1's and no. 2's, so to speak. Adios, David. PS Dear Damien, Maybe it was the loaves and fishes story that started response quota analysis ? Just saying. Even the 10 Commandments seems a tad pre-empting of the metric system some 2,000 years later. Just keeping on the faith / religious theme as I bid you all adieu.

Viamoonlight New Beginnings/Direction
  • replies: 2

For many years I wouldn't accept help, always knew that I needed help but couldn't accept it as I had thought myself unworthy of help. For many years and even still I think of myself the way my parents did, useless waste of space and good for nothing... View more

For many years I wouldn't accept help, always knew that I needed help but couldn't accept it as I had thought myself unworthy of help. For many years and even still I think of myself the way my parents did, useless waste of space and good for nothing. Over the years doctors and acute teams have given many theories on what was wrong with me. I was never all that open with them out of fear of being looked down on and locked up in a clinic never to leave it again. However last year, I had done the most stupid thing and tried harming myself as I thought the world would be better off without me. Now of course I know better, I have three beautiful children that are not better off without me I needed to remove the bad influences from our lives not myself. I have finally opened up with my doctors this year, the first time I told them that my life is one dream after another and that I don't always know which is real or not I was so scared of what was going to happen from there but in the end, nothing bad happened... They wanted to hear more about it. I told them how I often have dreams where I am someone else, usually a child/teenager and in those dreams life is amazingly beautiful, they have issues pop up in those dreams but they are solved and moved on from very easily, plus many more different types. Since then I have been getting help and labelled to have disassociation/derealisation with avoidance issues, anxiety and depression. The depression part I can't understand and often say to my doctors that I can't be depressed I feel nothing at all neither sad or happy, slight variations but neither in any great difference. The doctor says that it stems from depression so its there I just don't notice it because I've blocked out all the pain. There is a lot of my life I just have no memory of at all, I do not know what makes my body mimic panic attacks for going to the shopping centre or things like answering the phone... To me it feels like I'm afraid of everything for no reason at all. My psychologist is trying to prompt repressed memories at the moment so that I can find my safety zone and make it surround me instead of surround the walls of my house and locks on my doors. They have discovered that I have been 'hiding' (lack of a better word) since before I started school. Where even as a very young child I would hide in my cupboard to play. I've never had any friends, I've had lots of people that love to be around me and want me around in recent years but nobody I could call a friend and often I find that people are not around for very long and I can never remember why they left. My body and my mind to me are on different plains... I can have a wonderful week without any problems within my life or my children and yet my mind can be in a totally different place. I will do things without remembering doing them, I find myself suddenly in a different area of my house or when driving the car I won't remember having driven all the way home just suddenly in the driveway. My doctors say it is going to take a long time and not to expect too much from myself, which is hard sometimes since I don't remember what causes the fear it doesn't make sense why I have fear but its ok understanding will come with therapy. With therapy, I have finally at the age of 40 told my father that I will not accept his abuse anymore. Of course his response was that I'm out of the will, to which I said, people are more important than items only you care about that so I was uninvited from his funeral -shrugs- but I've stood strong and still I'm telling him that I have a right to say no to abuse. Although standing up and saying that has brought on several nightmares about him, I am still proud of myself. Not just for myself, but by doing so I have also shown my children they have the right to say no too and my 16 year old daughter told him no more as well However, I figure that since there are labels for it there must be others out there that know what its like or support groups or something somewhere This might be only the start of a very long road... but by not hiding from my doctors any more we are headed towards new beginnings and although I'm concerned about having to face those fears and feeling something I don't want to experience I know the benefit is going to extend through to my children. So to new beginnings and directions... One day my body won't be a puppet on strings and I will reach the goal my kids have set for me and that is to take them on a train ride