I have a friend and colleague who struggles with nearly identical mental health issues and patterns that I do but we define our experiences differently.  I will fully acknowledge that the cause and how we got to where we are is entirely different.  I will also acknowledge that the same diagnosis can present in different ways.  But what I’ve noticed in the difference of our experience is how we choose to experience it.  He still refers to himself and defines himself in the victim mentality—and he was a victim.  I was too and then I learned the hard way that the help I needed was not available to me.  The adults around me that could have helped me simply didn’t.  When I went to get help I was told that it wasn’t that serious—and I knew that I had to figure it out on my own.  I had to break the patterns, both mine and what was given to me, on my own.  As much as that left me broken in its own right, it did give me one thing: it made me acutely aware of how powerful we are and how much power we have over the mind.  I may not always execute that power correctly (ie I’ve become too controlling over certain things and I don’t always believe in or apply my power to my own experience) but I am 100% aware of what the mind can do.  And in spite of the physiological difficulties I can’t change (the chemicals that make me experience life like this) I have been able to navigate and compartmentalize my life to make it manageable.

Again, I don’t claim that this is perfect or that it works all the time—but I do know that I have managed to shift my entire mindset toward what I will and will not allow in my mind.  My friend stated that here are simply things he can’t change in his mind, that he has a disorder, that I couldn’t understand what he’s talking about.  And that is when I told him he needed to stop being a victim.  We have nearly identical experiences and he looks at his as something that can never be managed and that he needs to live a certain way because he can never learn to do something different.  Again, I acknowledge the physiological chemical differences in the brain, but I also believe this is a spectrum.  We can move ourselves along the spectrum with focus and determination and a different outlook.  He tried to use the example of a broken bone.  He asked if I ever had a compound fracture of the ulna and stated that if I hadn’t, then I would never know what that felt like.  My response was that I’ve had a broken bone.  There is truth to both scenarios: a broken bone is a broken bone—it doesn’t matter where.  But the severity and specificity of the break can have some differences and that would lead to a different treatment.  To which I told him that’s exactly what I mean: there are other options and avenues he’s choosing not to pursue because he has defined himself as a victim of this disorder.  He isn’t addressing what he CAN do and is focusing on what he can’t do. 

None of this is to say that I’m handling my stuff any better than anyone else: far from it.  I share enough here on a daily basis that most of you know this started as an effort to navigate my own healing.  I’m learning as I go.  But I DO know with 100% certainty that how we approach our healing makes all the difference and that we do have the ability to determine if we stay where we are or if we move on.  There are more ways to cope, to heal, to deal than what we tell ourselves and if we limit ourselves by defining our circumstance a certain way then we will never progress.  We will never heal fully if we limit ourselves to who we are now and what we see now.  We can’t choose our illness but we can choose how we progress with it and if we want to heal, if we want to learn to get to where we need to, we need to embrace the power of the mind and learn that we have more control over it than we think we do.  Even though we have the same issue, we are in vastly different places because of how we define what we are dealing with.  I’m at a different level than he is and he doesn’t believe that he can ever get there because he feels things are out of his control.  I’ve taken control (even if sometimes too far or not in the right area or even consistently) and it has given me a different perspective.