THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

In my last post I covered some of the emotional causes that preceded my burnout. I wanted to highlight nature of trauma and the effect this has on our whole system. Now I want to share some more layers of the journey.

How the impact of lockdown and changes in my living situation tipped my mental health over the edge. I truly experienced the depths of suicidal depression and towards a catatonic state. It was the scariest and darkest moment of my life, but I believe these stories should be shared, to remove stigma and create education around all the factors involved in people getting this unwell.

Healing is not linear, health is not one-dimensional. My journey has taught me that mind, body and spirit all play a role. So here we go…

The Dark Night of the Soul

In Bali a few years ago I contracted some hectic parasites which completely WASTED my digestive system. I now understand that when our gut health is compromised, it effects everything. Literally every system in our bodies. Many important hormones are created in the gut and the disruption of that can cause inflammation, allergies and low nutrient absorption. Not to mention the anxiety, and depression, the list goes on. My full gut healing story is for another day and is actually an ongoing process. I am currently on a healing protocol from my naturopath to keep dealing with this. I wouldn’t wish these issues on anybody, it fucking controls everything! To anyone else going through this journey with gut health and digestive issues. I see you and I have so much love and compassion for you cuz it SUCKS!!!

So these are just some of the thangs. All the fun thangs.

Once again, I am grateful for all of this.

Thankyou lessons.

So, when the parasites were really bad, along with my already heavily traumatised system this caused my anxiety to spike and my whole system was in constant survival mode. Our body can go into states such as fight, flight or freeze mode. For me it was flight. I was OUT. I was running. Yet of course I didn’t realise that’s what I was doing. I made plans to leave the country.

I went to Oz for three months to be with my family.

In reality I was simply running from all the emotional challenges in my life rather than dealing with them directly. I wanted to run from the place where a lot of the trauma had taken place. It housed the people that contributed to my trauma. So to me living there just had constant reminders and memories of all of those hard times. What I didn’t take into account was that I would have to eventually go back. I’d have to go back and face it all. And that I wasn’t healing by running.

I arrived back in NZ end of Jan 2020. I didn’t predict that COVID would hit and that’s what tipped me over the edge. HARD. I panicked. I got the most acute anxiety I had ever experienced. Still in a intense flight pattern, I decided in one day to go up North to my Dad; because at the time I had to move out of the house I was living in and I couldn’t imagine living on my own during lockdown.

I couldn’t be alone at the time and I couldn’t really sleep. If I did fall asleep I would feel like I was dying. I can tell you that sleep deprivation is enough to make anybody crazy. It’s actually known to send people into psychosis.

So in this state, I packed my things within a few hours, booked a flight and left, not knowing when I’d see my daughter again. I knew I couldn’t care for her properly at that time. I couldn’t give her what she needed and I knew her Dad and his partner could. This is a very hard, humbling and painful thing for any parent to admit. I still have many feelings around that.

So, off I went to be with my Dad which I am very grateful for but that’s when I realised how bad things had really gotten.

The lockdown gave me a chance to STOP for the first time in my life.

I always kept myself so consumed with “stuff” to keep my overly active brain busy so I didn’t have to deal with the real issues at hand. So EVERYTHING I had suppressed for so many years all came up to the surface. Funny that. There was no where to hide.

Here comes the crash!

On arrival to the North Island my Dad had already organised a doctor and psychologist to help me. I had such high anxiety levels that I could not even make simple decisions, I felt like my brain was broken. I couldn’t think straight. I could still read but couldn’t take anything in. I couldn’t focus on a movie or conversation properly. It sounded so dumb saying “my brain doesn’t work, I can’t think” but I now believe that my stress levels got so maxed out that my prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that manages those things; had started to shut down.

I couldn’t even handle talking to the psychologist.

Well I could, but I just didn’t have the capacity to do the exercises she gave me or really engage with her. My brain would go blank. Black, empty, nothingness. So even though she was good at what she did, she didn’t get anywhere with me.

The other doctor I saw literally told me the day after I arrived in the North that I had a SICK brain and that I just had to go on antidepressants.

It really didn’t resonate with the way the doctor spoke to me and how she delivered the information. The energy and tone from this woman was so dominating and un-empathetic that I put up a massive wall. I was already scared and shut down even more. I couldn’t find a way in my mind to trust her. Someone you are meant to be able to trust was using her “power” to judge and force her authority on me. She clearly didn’t have skills to deal with someone who is experiencing very intense trauma responses, in which case creating a sense of safety is primary. This is a common issue in the western health system.

Addicted to “health”

I also resisted the doctors because I had deep rooted beliefs that I was “natural” I wouldn’t put chemicals in my system. At the time I only ate organic, no sugar, no dairy, no gluten all the things. I was very controlling about my health. This all started when I was trying to heal my gut as every single thing I ate reacted to my tummy. So I tried to control what I put inside me. Looking at it now, I was controlling the only thing I could in my life at the time, because everything else was COMPLETELY out of my control. Basically I has an eating disorder associated with healthy eating. I went completely raw for a month, I went completely sugar free for a month another time, didn’t even have sugar from fruit, became completely addicted to reading labels to see what was in food and if it had any chemicals or numbers in it and if it did my body and mind would just say NO.

I would get full blown anxiety walking into a supermarket, having completely disconnected from my intuition, my mind just told me that ALL food was BAD. My poor body, no wonder I couldn’t digest food, my mind was telling it that it was bad for me and it would react, so what did I honestly think that my body was going to do with that information. Durrrrr.

That mind body connection is SUCH a real thing. The trouble is, I believe the western world has completely separated the body from the mind and treats them as such. We get labeled with different illnesses because they need an explanation for them. “ You have major depressive disorder, anxiety, bi-polar, PTSD, Multiple personality disorder and the list goes on. I guess it gives us humans a way to understand what we may otherwise not be able me fathom by putting a name to a symptom. I believe that this then makes us attach to the label. “ I have depression or I have anxiety” but by doing this, we then give the diagnosis power. We feed it, it becomes apart of our identity and defines us when it doesn’t have to be that way.

Has any doctor mentioned to you or asked what traumas you may have experienced? Or maybe that those diagnosis’s might just be a symptom of trauma that’s stuck and stored in your body and spirit? What would happen if we actually became aware of what those traumas were and put in the work to dissect them and process them; and then learn the tools to release them from our body, which then would help cure the symptom?

Getting to the root cause of the symptom, because I can tell you that they didn’t just arise out of nowhere. So many other healing traditions and cultures know this. But the western medical system seems to override it.

Sure, there is no SET in stone way to heal but there are a lot of people that can help you find a way and help guide you to what will work and resonate with you. It takes being open and proactive to make it work; but if you want it bad enough, you WILL find a way. I take a lot of inspiration from eastern modalities purely for the fact they treat the body as ONE and I find that really beautiful because we are all ONE and all CONNECTED to nature, to each other and through all levels of ourselves.

If you haven’t noticed by now I have many side stories that stray from the main story… tangents. BUT the fact is I will always find a way to get back to the original point where it all links together in the end.

Soz it’s just how my busy brain operates.

Wishing for Death

After some convincing I think I tried anti-depressants for ten days, convinced my psychologist I didn’t need them because if my mind was telling my body they weren’t going to work, well then how could they? We made an agreement with the doctor that we would try just talk therapy for now and if we didn’t get the desired outcome we would try on the meds.

This was hard for my Dad to understand as he has always gone the medical way and needs to see scientific evidence and facts, so he couldn’t understand why I would be so resistant. Which was EXTREMELY hard for him and I did hate having to put him through that. At the time I hated my beliefs being challenged and I wanted to be accepted for what was true to me, I see now that all he wanted was to help me the best way he knew how. I was just stubborn, closed off and just wanted to be free as a 32 year old woman to make my own choices.

Unfortunately I also wasn’t quite clear on how unwell I’d become so all the resistance caused so much tension and stress for everyone. I just do hope he knows that I am grateful. Time went by, nothing got better. If anything they got worse. Much worse than I ever anticipated. Due to a number of factors I continued to spiral. I was constantly asked if I had suicidal thoughts. I did begin to develop those.

Every day they got stronger and stronger. In my waking hours ALL my mind would do was think of ways I could kill myself. “Maybe I could jump out the window and run onto the main road in the dark and get run over. Maybe I could drive into a truck or a tree, maybe I could take all the pills I could find in the house and not wake up again”. Sounds hectic, but it was relentless and SCARY AF.

How on earth the mind can start feeding you those thoughts still baffles me. I still wasn’t sleeping so I got addicted to sleeping pills because the only time that the thoughts would stop was when I was asleep. I was so exhausted that I just wanted to sleep forever and wake up feeling refreshed. Looking back now, I don’t think that I actually truly wanted to die, I just wanted a rest and a break.

The thoughts became so overpowering that I reached breaking point. I made the call in my mind that I was going to take all the sleeping pills that I had and went and found some pills and took them ALL. So I think I had something like 10 or so sleeping pills and a tray of codeine. I took them all one morning, on a day I knew that dad was not going to home for the day. I didn’t succeed but it gave me sleep and just no recollection of that day.

I remember coming out for dinner and having to go and vomit and then I went back to bed. For whatever reason I told my Dad what I had done the next day. Of course he freaked out and got incredibly upset, I was so naïve and didn’t obviously think about the consequences. He asked how much codeine I had taken and in relation to your weight if you have too much, the Panadol can attack your liver and you will slowly die over the course of a week. It’s not an instant thing. This I wasn’t aware of so he called the doctor and it was ok. Thank god.

You would have thought I would have been frightened and woken up. But this wasn’t the case. The thoughts continued. Got worse. I couldn’t handle feeling like I was in a big black dark hole any longer. Couldn’t see a way out. So two weeks to the day, I did it AGAIN. I found some other stuff. Think I got prescribed more sleeping pills and mixed up a concoction and as soon as I took it, I got scared.

Straight away went and told my Dad, because it was the second time, I got taken straight to the emergency department and was hooked up to all the things and slept and was out of it for hours. I wasn’t allowed to leave for five hours to make sure I didn’t have a toxic reaction from what I had taken. The hardest part about this is that, I know to a lot of people, when someone overdoses, a common reaction is to think that they did it to try and get attention and that it’s selfish and such a disrespectful thing to do. This just couldn’t be more further from the truth. I was crying out for HELP. I suppose if you haven’t experienced the depths of major depressive disorder then it is truly IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to relate and understand if they haven’t been there themselves, as much as they try to.

I was in so much mental anguish that I NEEDED it to STOP. You don’t have any clarity. It’s like complete tunnel vision. You don’t think about anyone else. You feel like life would be so much easier on everyone else if you weren’t around. If you weren’t burdening everyone else. Now that I am on the other side, this now seems like an unfathomable concept; but at the time I didn’t think about Indie, my family, my friends, anyone. I did NOT have the mental capacity to be able to do so.

For anyone reading this, I know it must be hard to comprehend and you’re possibly thinking what the actual fuck!!! that is SO SELFISH. Just when you’re in that situation it’s not what you see, You can’t see outside the tunnel. It’s like you’re trapped. The only way out in your mind is to end the suffering. I personally was so frightened of my thoughts and whatever was going on in my head at the time that you can’t begin to explain what is going on to even get help, because it doesn’t make sense to even yourself. It’s proof of how POWERFUL the mind truly is and how easily it can become out of control if you let it run wild and don’t have the awareness to reign it in when things start to slide. Being able to understand that you are NOT your thoughts and that we actually have the power to change our thoughts at any moment before they start to spiral out of control.

I recall I kept saying I don’t know what’s going on and to someone who hasn’t experienced what a deep depression feels like, that just seems like a cop out.

So… obviously I didn’t succeed in ending my life, but what happened next was the only alternative at the time. I’ll release that story next week. Till then much love and……

Stay Safe

If you or someone you know is experiencing intrusive or suicidal thoughts you can call LIFELINE in NZ on 0800 543 354