You are not your illness!

The usefulness in diagnosing something is that it helps you to figure out what treatment may be most effective to get RID of the symptoms!  If you have a cold then the symptoms will often be that you are sneezing and coughing and have a runny nose.  If you get more rest, take Vitamin C and take whatever naturopathic or mainstream medicines that you use then it is likely to go away faster.  But your cold is not WHO YOU ARE!  When I had hypoglycemia I had headaches, cold hands and feet, serious mood swings when I needed food, etc etc.  I learned that sleep, protein, exercise and managing stress would level my blood sugar and now that I do those things, I no longer have hypoglycemia.  I believe the same is true for mental illnesses.  I was talking to someone who had been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.  She said that since she has been practicing mindfulness she is able to focus and manage her reactivity much better than she ever believed she would.  I’m not advising you to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Diagnoses and medication are helpful for some people so they can level out the chemistry in their bodies so that they can actually think and behave differently.  When you behave and think more positively, then you feel better and it becomes easier to, in turn, behave and think more clearly.  When you don’t think of yourself AS the label but experience it as something you are working on overcoming or living with in a healthier way then there is more separateness from it as your identity internally.  Then you will find that both you and others will see you more clearly as the whole person that you are.  In the movie “A Beautiful Mind” the main character struggles with Schizophrenia.  I’ve attached a clip from the last scene of the movie where he talks about love having saved him.  They show him noticing the voices that used to control him and he ignores them and walks away with his wife.  Love yourself.  Surround yourself with people who are loving towards you.  Love is, and always will be, the only thing that heals mental illness.

A Beautiful Mind, ending scene
http://youtu.be/i82jqGq_tio

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