We are what we say we are

Daily living with Emma wears me down. Normally I awaken feeling refreshed after a good night’s sleep and I go to my window and give thanks and a prayer for Emma, asking that she be healed. The day starts with hope and thanks.

However, this morning Emma walks into the bedroom, lies next to me, and tells me that she woke up at 11:00 pm last night and couldn’t go back to sleep. She looked rested to me, though the stress lines on her forehead between her eyes were there – seems like they are there more often. Was she up for over 9 hours in the dark not sleeping? It sure didn’t look like it, but she insisted she didn’t sleep, and arguing about that wasn’t important.

This was not a good start to my day, and to tell you the truth, I lost it during breakfast. Hearing her constant monotonous story of how scary it is and what if she is like this the rest of her life clicked on the fricken mean mommy in me. It was exhausting and frustrating to hear her damn broken record of me, me, me, me, me.

The night before, I had watched the first 40 minutes of Wayne Dyer’s PBS lecture on … manifesting… and felt such a relief upon hearing his lesson on the soul and how we are not our bodies, we are not our minds. We all are part of God, the Tao, the Source. It sounded very Eastern philosophy but he also connected it to Bible teaching. Not sure which Bible he was reading from (I think it was the Gideon since he said he took it from the hotel room), but it was different. He spun some off-sounding quotes – one about Jesus saying that we are all Gods, and God is Love. And then another from the old Testament when Moses was told to go to the Pharoah and tell him to let His people go. When Moses asked God, who/what will you be called? God said “I am that I am.”

I am that I am which means I am. Those are powerful words. Wayne Dyer went on to say that when you use those words, you are what you state. Saying “I am poor” sets you up to be poor. You are declaring who you are.

Four weeks ago, I had Emma doing affirmations after listening to Doug Bench’s Build a Better Brain audio CDs. He said to do only positive positive affirmations, i.e. “I will lose weight” is a negative positive because it infers that one is fat. A positive positive affirmation in that case would be, “I am thin and fit and I eat a healthy balanced diet.”

It sounded like a great technique and I had her do the affirmation “I am strong and confident and everything is beautiful.” She would do these, not on her own, but at my constant reminders – which was tiring, but she did them. 4 weeks ago, Emma was actually much much more capable of performing duties such as running errands for me outside of the house, such as driving to the Mall and picking up lunch or to the post office and mailing out packages. She would come home and say things like – the light doesn’t look normal, or people’s faces looked funny. However, she was able to handle this, and we would also go out together and she seemed almost normal except for things looking strange sometimes and noises sounding louder than normal. Sometimes she would have a very apprehensive look come over her, and a few comforting words would make her relax again.

She started going downhill. I don’t know if she has hit bottom yet.  It has felt like she has, and then she goes even lower.  I really don’t know the reason but there were several factors. Maybe it was the drugs for schizophrenia that Dr. G (her psychiatrist) prescribed and had to change up several times because Emma’s reaction to them was bad or no results at all. Another factor was that she stopped taking Captomer – this was to be taken 3 times a day to help eliminate the mercury in her system. Another was the prescription from Dr. R, a top neurologist who did not think Emma had schizophrenia and was treating her for migraine headaches (she had constant low grade pain headaches which he said were migraines) with increasing dosages of Topiramate. She was constantly fixated on what would happen to her if she committed suicide. It was terrifying to hear her talk about that, though I got a little more immune to the shock of it since it was like a mantra and she would ask anyone who would listen to her what they thought would happen, if she ended her life.

With so much change, and Dr. G’s medications for schizophrenia not making her symptoms better, Emma became more and more depressed and sounds and her distorted sensitive vision became more and more unbearable. Dr. G was getting very perplexed with Emma’s condition. Her symptoms were not really those of schizophrenia, and not quite those of bi-polar, and during one of his trial change ups, he wrote up a prescription for 150mg of Seroquel. She took it twice, and both times she would get emotionally violent, saying that she wants to slam her head on the glass or do some violent act. I will, in a later post, write down the sequence of the anti psychosis drugs that she was on. I was really getting to feel that these were not working, and could possibly be making things worse. I spoke to Dr. G on the phone and after a bit of differing opinion, the decision was made to have her stop the Seroquel completely, and stay on the low dose of Geodone that she was still using.

Meanwhile, Emma’s mantra started to change to “I can’t survive, I can’t go on.” I had to constantly prop her up, tell her that she will get better, that we were finding the answers and just keep holding on. She began having thoughts about hurting people, and even some sexual thoughts that disgusted her.

Around this time, a speaker at a local event that specialized in the Law of Attraction said that positive affirmations are very important in order to achieve any goal or success, but they must be positive, and they must also be believable. Thus, a heavy person, looking in a mirror and saying “I am thin and fit and only eat healthy foods” would be lying and make this affirmation not work as well as saying “I am working on getting thin.” Bing! Aha! I thought that I could apply this to Emma, and the next day, her positive affirmation was changed to “I am working on getting better.”

At first, this seemed to be a better affirmation because she could believe it. Just saying the affirmation was doing some form of work to get her better. It was done very sporadically and most of the time I had to insist that she do them. She stopped looking at her positive cards of things that make her happy. Being with Emma was like having to carry her on my back just to get her to do simple things like affirmations or positive thinking. Her negative, scary, hopeless attitude was consuming her, and it was dragging me down too.

I would sometimes think that maybe it would be better if Emma ended her life. The peace and quiet of not having her drone on and on about her fears, problems, symptoms would be blissful. The constant battle of getting her to do the positives or deal with sound and light with sunglasses or headphones was so weary. She was so desperately trying to find peace and a place of no more suffering.

My husband’s preaching was also getting very irritating to me. I have come to hate the Christian religion that he belongs to.  Not just because they think their way is the only way, but because of how they believe all the answers to all the problems in the world are found in the Bible and that one just has to put their faith in God (and of course be baptized with them). This is not only true for them, but in many of the other Christian sects, and although I do believe in God the Father and Jesus His Son, I also believe there is more to the Creator than what the Bible teaches.

So anyway, back to Wayne Dyer’s “I am” talk. To get Emma to say “I am getting better” is getting harder and harder – it is almost as if a part of her is telling her not to say or feel that, and her body is not cooperating with staying positive either. She will say that she has to go to the bathroom, or her leg hurts. However, I will keep on her to say those words, and make sure it starts with “I AM” and not just “working on getting better.” Those 2 words are very powerful, and her subconscious or whatever part of her that is filled with the negative and fear reacts to the statement “I AM” as if it has to pay attention.

For myself, I will do a few “I AM able to handle this” and “I AM a good mother.” Try the “I AM” in your life. Watch the Wayne Dyer video if you can. The minutes just before you fall asleep, do your most powerful positive “I AMs” and let those take wing through the night, and perhaps continue on forever.