Down to Earth

Lately, I’ve had trouble sticking to the real world. I spend a lot of time doing cerebral things - writing, sitting at the computer, reading, listening to people - and then there is the issue of those other, extra dimensions I go to that normal people tend not to visit...I sort of lose myself, though I don’t often go all the way to delusions.

And it occurred to me, maybe we could all use some advice on how to keep from floating away in the ozone. Altered states are easy for some of us. The trick is how to get back.

So I started a list for myself of my top ten grounding techniques. It’s not a very long list yet. What I’m hoping is that you, my readers, will contribute and help me and all of us find good ways to come back down to earth when we’ve been floating away. Here’s the beginning list:

1. Eat something. It’s a direct connection to the physical and literally weighs you down. Comfort food is good, especially meat if you’re not vegetarian.

2. Take a walk. The rhythmic motion of your body helps, and so does seeing some nature, if there’s any you can get to. Actually, any exercise will help.

3. Clean something. The dirtier the better. Scrubbing the sink, sweeping the porch, shaking out the welcome mat, all of it counts. Plus, you get a clean rug (or whatever) at the end of it.

4. Personal hygiene. Getting your hair wet or cutting your toenails is real three-dimensional stuff. Putting on makeup does NOT count - that takes you off into the area of fantasy, who you wish you were, how you’d like to look.

5. Gardening. Start by pulling weeds. The original down-to-earth.

6. Do something with your pet. Stroke it, walk it, play with it, help it turn its hamster wheel. Direct interaction with animals is an energy transformer, and being responsible is a good tie to life.

7. Dispose of clutter. It could be paper, or it could be the knick knacks on the shelves or your three hundred pair of shoes. Deciding what you can and can’t live without brings you right to the here and now. This sort of goes with ‘clean something.’

8. Get manual. Build a shelf, sew on a button, chop vegetables. Microwaving and using the sewing machine do not count.

9. Meditate. I recommend yoga especially, because it’s physical.

10. This one may sound odd, but it works for me: activate your root chakra with your voice. You do this by saying or singing the syllable “UH” for as long as you can, on as deep a note as you can. Supposedly a good number of times to do this is seven, but choose for yourself. This gets a vibration going right at your base, which is good for you in all sorts of ways and appeals to the primitive part of you. Think of it as caveman therapy, if you like.

What else can you suggest to me? I’d love to hear what works for you so I can try it myself.

Deborah is a public speaker and the author of Is There Room for Me, Too? 12 Steps & 12 Strategies for Coping with Mental Illness. She has also published two romantic comedies. All three books are available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, Kindle Editions, iBooks, and other major vendors; or  you can order them from your local bookstore. Visit her web page at www.lafruche.net, or see her catalog at www.lastlaughproductions.net. Her newest project is a guided meditation CD, “Island Journey,” produced with her husband, musician Robert Hamaker; available on iTunes, Amazon, and many other venues

On the Move

I’ve been thinking this month about resolutions and why we make them. Depending on the year, I can fall on either side of the argument about whether to make New Year’s Resolutions or not. But it’s really not about “I’m going to lose 10 pounds.” It’s really about hope, and that’s something we all need.

Life with mental illness can often be devoid of the markers other people use to gauge their progress. If you can’t work, for instance, there is none of the built-in feeling of “I’m finished” at the end of the day, no projects you’ve completed, no deadlines met, and no raises or promotions. Sometimes bare survival can get very hard indeed, and we feel that is all we can expect out of life.

But survival for survival’s sake is not enough for human beings. Resolutions speak to the human need to say, “I’ve decided I want things to change, and I’m going to MAKE them change.”  When you are prone to altered states, it can seem that everything is out of your control. It is especially important for people in our position to have reachable goals and possible dreams. As day by day goes by in your funky supported housing and nothing gets better or changes, it is easy to stop dreaming. This way lies apathy and death. Not having a dream is a most pernicious form of suicide. I read somewhere that when you are killing time, you die a little yourself in the process. We need hope.  As Abraham Cowley once wrote, “Hope! of all ills that men endure, the only cheap and universal cure.”

It may be useless and discouraging to wish for A Cure. It may even be too much, at any given time, to say, “I’m going to lose the 60 pounds my medicine put on me.” But you could start with a broader dream, such as, “I’m going to have better health,” and then think up little reachable steps, such as taking a multivitamin every morning. Then you can proceed through other small steps, such as eating a salad twice a week, or taking a regular walk, and as you achieve these things you gain confidence. One day, eventually, you will be consulting your doctor about just how few calories you need to keep the pounds off, and designing a diet for yourself.

By the way, if your dream is eventually supporting yourself again, I recommend you look up the International Clubhouse (www.iccd.org). If there is a Clubhouse within reach, this is an excellent place to take part in a work-ordered day, train for supported positions in the community, and eventually re-enter the work force. Their statistics on the numbers of members who have succeeded in this process are impressive and encouraging.

The important thing is that we each have a dream that is meaningful to us, and not outside the bounds of possibility. Perhaps your dream will be a variation of your original life goal before receiving your diagnosis. And then be sure to support that dream, at whatever speed works for you, with little bitty steps in the direction you want. They can be tiny and infrequent steps, and it is not abnormal to fall backwards sometimes and have to start over. As long as we feel we are moving. I would personally recommend 2 or 3 goals, so that when one is not panning out you can at least look to some other goal for your satisfaction. For example, I haven’t written even one chapter of a novel this year, but I did lose a bunch of weight. So when my inner critic starts carping at me, I have something to shut it up.

Of course, manic people like me may actually make too many resolutions (or too big), and suffer collapse and burn out. When I realized this year that my projected resolutions numbered FIFTEEN, I decided to call it off.  You don't always have to have a specific resolution. You just have to want to go somewhere, take one step, and believe that the next step is possible.


Deborah is a public speaker and the author of Is There Room for Me, Too? 12 Steps & 12 Strategies for Coping with Mental Illness. She has also published two romantic comedies. All three books are available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, Kindle Editions, iBooks, and other major vendors; or  you can order them from your local bookstore. Her newest project is a guided meditation CD, “Island Journey,” produced with her husband, musician Robert Hamaker; available on iTunes, Amazon, and many other venues.Visit her web page at www.lafruche.net, or see her catalog at www.lastlaughproductions.net.

Last Minute Gift

The present nobody left you under the tree is peace of mind. Am I right? And just about now, you’d do anything to have it.

I have one word for you: yoga. Or even just a serious program of stretches. If you spend 20 minutes doing yoga stretches or any real stretches that involve your whole body, this will do a lot for your frame of mind. Why?

Well, there are some standard answers, such as what it does for your muscles, and for your circulation. There are some more esoteric reasons also that I happen to subscribe to: when a mentally ill person, or any person, walks around (or sits around) all day getting more and more tense, it is not only the muscles that bunch up and freeze, and it is not only the circulation that gets stuck. The energy moving through your system also gets stuck. It balls and snarls up in the joints and other places where you’ve been wincing or freezing. It makes you feel rotten, and as time passes with no relief, you feel MORE rotten, building and building, e.g. Holiday stress. And in many ways, mental illness is about having a snarled up energy system.

If you believe the body has only physical components, this won’t wash with you, but if you think humans are a little bit more, you will agree that we are also our state of consciousness, which pretty much equates to our energy state. The Chinese knew this, and believe that the whole body is an energy system arranged on meridians, almost like a grid, along which energy flows. Tapping into or blocking the energy flow at any point has measurable effects on our health and peace of mind, and this is the theory behind acupressure, acupuncture, and EFT (the system of treatment commonly known as “that tapping thing”). Imbalances in your energy state, I believe, are very much connected to things like being tense, jittery, and overanxious (Anxiety Disorder); depletion of energy helps to make us Depressed, and god knows that too much energy trapped in one place, not able to be dispersed, can certainly lead to Mania.

So what happens when you do yoga, or even some slow, thorough stretches, is that you open up these kinks in the system and let the energy flow freely again. It doesn’t hurt that a good yoga class often has music that helps puts you into a trancelike state, and that movements are smooth, positions being thoughtfully held for many moments at a time. The net result, at least for a time, is PEACE OF MIND. Your energy and circulation and muscles are moving in a smooth, balanced manner again, and you feel better in every way. I don’t know about you, but that’s what I want for Christmas.

I can’t speak for everybody. But I know that I can walk into a yoga class in terrible shape, maybe even just on the edge of going psychotic, and I walk out of there energized and peaceful, as balanced as I ever get. If your mental and emotional states are problematic, this is definitely a gift you should give yourself. Go down to the local YMCA and sign up; they have scholarships based on income, just right for the disabled person. Going even once a week can make a difference to your life.

It doesn’t make the Christmas rush go away, but it’s the best advice I’ve got.

Deborah is a public speaker and the author of Is There Room for Me, Too? 12 Steps & 12 Strategies for Coping with Mental Illness. She has also published two romantic comedies. All three books are available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, Kindle Editions, iBooks, and other major vendors; or  you can order them from your local bookstore. Visit her web page at www.lafruche.net, or see her catalog at www.lastlaughproductions.net. Her newest project is a guided meditation CD produced with her husband, musician Robert Hamaker; available on iTunes and many other venues.

The Prime Directive

The Prime Directive

Today I want to talk about something I need to hear, myself. Back around the end of October and early November, I was suddenly exceptionally busy. There was a trip out of state, an anniversary, a CD release party to throw; there were all kinds of socializing and chores and errands and projects. I was fulfilling the world’s agenda for me, ignoring my self-care routines. Then one day, wham, it all hits me at once...and I have to spend the next several days doped to the eyebrows with anti-psychotics. Everything came to a standstill.

Because I forgot. I can’t do all that. I forgot the Prime Directive every person like me needs to follow. It’s as important to me as any breathless crisis of the Starship Enterprise. It’s simple and it goes like this: Put Your Sanity First.

That means first ahead of everything. Everyone. Period.

I suppose you could say I agree with Eckhart Tolle: at any given moment, our state of consciousness is more important than anything else that may be happening. When your brain is prone to go flying off in odd directions, that’s how it has to be. If you’re going to live in the real world, you have to be something that I will loosely call “sane.” Of course, what I consider “sane” and what you consider “sane” can be two very different kettles of fish, and that’s all right. All I really mean by it is “more or less functional” or “sufficiently aware of standard reality.” I do not mean symptom-free, since many of us are virtually never symptom free. We can sometimes function with symptoms, at least to a certain point.

But I take this basic “sanity” level very seriously. If I am driving and I suddenly realize my brain is going south, I turn around and head home. NO destination is worth it. If I’m not feeling sane enough, I skip the party, no matter how much I want to go. If I am not sufficiently sane, I try not to stay in angry discussions (that’s a hard one). Functionality is more important than a job, or whatever I’m doing, or any plans I had, or even my husband (I have a lot of trouble remembering that one). There’s just nothing out there more important than keeping my head relatively straight, unless my physical survival is under immediate threat.

My strategy when things get weird is to withdraw. I am better off in a quiet place alone where I can take my pill, get calm, and not scream at anybody. Other people need more structure or activity, not less, and they get very busy. Others need exactly what I don’t want: people to talk to. Coping skills are individual. If it works for you, it’s worth doing.

But whatever your coping skills are, they need to be used early and consistently. What I did last month was ignore all my personal warning signs and plow on. I kept trying to function like I had a garden-variety brain.

I don’t have a garden-variety brain, and neither do you (maybe nobody does). My state of consciousness requires special, gentle treatment to thrive, like an exotic hothouse flower. The difference between me and those fragile flowers is that I can care for myself. The trick is to pay attention, every day, and not forget.

Deborah is a public speaker and the author of Is There Room for Me, Too? 12 Steps & 12 Strategies for Coping with Mental Illness. She has also published two romantic comedies. All three books are available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, Kindle Editions, iBooks, and other major vendors; or  you can order them from your local bookstore. Visit her web page at www.lafruche.net, or see her catalog at www.lastlaughproductions.net. Her newest project is a guided meditation CD produced with her husband, musician Robert Hamaker; available on iTunes and many other venues.

Rx for Anxiety

Anxiety is one of the more stressful altered states life can dish out. If the feeling is continual, and applies to everything, always, then you have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and you are always on the edge of screaming. It’s very hard to live life this way, with “relaxation” a fantasy word that only applies to other people. Unless you are drugged, it just never goes away, ever. You live in grinding fear of what the future, the next hour, the next minute, will bring. Your very next action could be the one that will send the sky crashing in on you, and you can’t help tensing for it.

Short of a strong right to the jaw, or heavy meds, there are only a few things I’ve ever found that helped much. The list includes music, reading, deep breathing, yoga, meditation, natural beauty, and really good hanky panky. You probably have a few remedies of your own. The other really serious deterrent is living strictly in the present moment.

There are a number of Eastern philosophies that recommend this, and they do so for a lot of interesting reasons. But the one that counts for us is this: if you are only right here, right now, you are not thinking of the future. And fear - which is what anxiety really is - is all about the future: what will happen IF, what will happen AFTER, what will happen NEXT.

The present-moment-only state of mind takes your whole, alert attention, pulling you away from all that speculation. It is a great state to be in if you’re playing sports, because it jacks up your reaction time. It’s the state we should all be in while driving, but mostly aren’t. It is the way not to think yourself to death. It is also the behavior recommended to addicts to get through drug yearnings. One moment at a time, resisting a craving - or dealing with almost any pain - is bearable. It’s the anticipation of an hour or a week or a lifetime that breaks us down.

When you are in mental pain, try to drag your attention OUTWARD again. What color is the curtain? What does the carpet smell like? Savor the taste of your coffee, your fingertip on the table top, the feel of your jacket settling across your shoulders. What is the barista saying to that brunette? How many studs is she wearing? How many people in this room? What is their age range? Do they all speak English? Any with an accent? NOTICE what is around you, react only to what is required this very second, and you will feel better. The voice that tortures you cannot be heard as well when all your senses are engaged and your mind is focussed on right now, right here.

By the way, this is not only useful for Anxiety. Depression is based partly on dwelling on the past (and its failures); if you drag yourself to this moment, and it really is intolerable, perhaps you will be moved to do something about it, which beats the hell out of brooding. And if you are heading towards psychosis, putting your hand out and touching a real wall, smelling the scent of an actual couch, might help more than any words going by (inside or outside your head). It couldn’t hurt, anyway.

Try it. Practice bringing yourself back to this very second as many times as you can remember to during the day. Even if everything you’ve ever dreaded comes to pass, one moment at a time you will outlast it. Nothing is forever. Only for now.

Deborah is a public speaker and the author of Is There Room for Me, Too? 12 Steps & 12 Strategies for Coping with Mental Illness. She has also published two romantic comedies. All three books are available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, Kindle Editions, iBooks, and other major vendors; or  you can order them from your local bookstore. Visit her web page at www.lafruche.net, or see her catalog at www.lastlaughproductions.net. Her newest project is a guided meditation CD produced with her husband, musician Robert Hamaker.

Addendum - The Art of Derangement

My last blog talked about mental health programs that emphasized Art as a means toward recovery. I had wanted to add the Art Works Gallery in Riverside, California, to that list; but I could not find an active page on the web and concluded sadly that they were defunct.

Good news, however. I received an email from their Services Coordinator, and they are very much alive and well, though their web presence seems to be in some sort of transition.  Let me tell you about them, as an addition to my earlier list of resources.

Art Works and Recovery Art Corps is one arm of the Jefferson Transitional Programs, a respected long-time recovery system. The only URL I have at the moment is www.jtp.friends.org;  perhaps the link there to the Art Works program will be working again by the time I post this. The gallery is on 3741 6th Street in Riverside, and is open Monday through Saturday. Their classes and activities for October alone included collage, painting small-scale items, finger weaving, and ‘zines and journalling, to name a few. They also opened an exhibit in October oriented toward empowerment of the artists associated with the gallery. Their latest flyer announces “We believe in the wellness and healing that art so often brings to artists in every genre...we have seen countless artists, writers, craftsmen, actors and musicians find meaning and purpose through...artistic endeavors.” Amen to that!

If you’re anywhere near Riverside and not yet involved with this center, stop by the gallery at 10:30 on Thursdays to sign up. They can be reached at (951) 683-1279, or email:   jtpartcenter@gmail.com.

My understanding is that this project is supported by funds from the California Mental Health Services Act which was passed a few years ago. Those funds are likely to be differently distributed soon due to a recent bill (I believe it’s AB100 but don’t quote me) that gives control of these funds less to the State and Administrative level and more to the County level, down where the action really takes place and the needs are better known. Some programs are bound to be shuffled around and defunded, but it is to be hoped Art Works will carry on.

More news on the reshuffling when I figure it out a little better; stay tuned.


Deborah is a public speaker and the author of Is There Room for Me, Too? 12 Steps & 12 Strategies for Coping with Mental Illness. She has also published two romantic comedies. All three books are available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, Kindle Editions, iBooks, and other major vendors; or  you can order them from your local bookstore. Visit her web page at www.lafruche.net, or see her catalog at www.lastlaughproductions.net.

The Art of Derangement

One of the discoveries in psychiatric treatment these days seems to be that artistic endeavors help us get sane.

Hell, I could have told them that.

I discovered long ago that art – in my case in the form of writing – is one of the few places on the planet that has room for unusual thinking. There is praise for being original, even if original isn’t always beautiful. I discovered decades ago that in certain artistic circles there is even a certain cachet to mental illness, since it guarantees that your points of view will not be run of the mill, and may help give others a new slant on old issues.

Of course, art is good therapy, or there wouldn’t be sand trays, drama therapy, music therapy, art therapy, at hospitals and clinics all over the nation. But it seems these days that artistic expression is also coming into its own as a way for the mentally ill to come back to themselves and connect back to mainstream reality.

Look for instance at PeaceLove Studios in Providence, Rhode Island. The founder of PeaceLove, Jeffrey Sparr, has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and discovered to his delight that when he painted, he had no symptoms. Now he runs a series of studios and community classes dedicated to connecting people through original art. Check them out at http://www.peacelovestudios.com/about. I guarantee you will find it heartwarming and hopeful.

Closer to home for me here in California is the Peer Recovery Art Project, which operates out of Modesto. The P.R.A.P. exhibits artwork every third Thursday  at the downtown Modesto Art Walks, puts out a monthly newsletter called Renaissance, holds art exhibits at no cost to the artists, and received the 2010 Stanislaus Arts Council Excellence in Arts Award. It is described as “an art collaborative in which some of the artists may have lived experience as mental health consumers and their art may reflect that experience but the emphasis is on respect of the art,” says CEO John Black. One of the purposes of the group is to help end stigma, which is a nice thing to be doing while you enjoy yourself creating. This 501 C (3) public charity group can be found at www.peerrecoveryartproject.org, or email them at peerrecoveryart@yahoo.com, or call (209)985-0467.

And if your art is not visual but literary, you might consider submitting work for publication to Open Minds Quarterly, in Canada, or their offshoot online, The Writer’s Circle (both projects of the Northern Initiative for Social Action). They accept work from persons with psychiatric diagnoses, although all the work need not be about psychiatric topics, and have an Artists’ Loft that produces the artwork for the 8 ½ x 11” glossy magazine. Recent projects include a poetry page and a photography contest. Open Minds Quarterly has its own Facebook page, if that’s your cup of tea, or check them out at: http://nisa.on.ca/index.php?option=content&task=category&sectionid=3&id=11&Itemid=30.  You can email them at openminds@nisa.on.ca.

In California, you can probably can do a lot worse to connect yourself to art than by visiting NAMI’s site for “consumer” (that means those of us with a diagnosis) programs, to see what else is going on, not just with art but with all of their fine services. You can find them at www.namicaconsumerprograms.wordpress.com.

Meanwhile, don’t wait for anybody. Just dig out that old jar of playdough and have some fun. What could it possibly hurt? And it might help. A lot.

Deborah is a public speaker and the author of Is There Room for Me, Too? 12 Steps & 12 Strategies for Coping with Mental Illness. She has also published two romantic comedies. All three books are available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, Kindle Editions, iBooks, and other major vendors or  you can order them from your local bookstore. Visit her web page at www.lafruche.net, or see her catalog at www.lastlaughproductions.net.