Home from hospital

Edited for privacy reasons

You'll fit in fine if your'e just nice ............everyone responds according to how we treat them.

Thnk about the movie "Groundhog-Day"..........

Hey...no need to be embarrassed. Be proud of yourself.

You are lucky to have a man and great family to stand beside you. You are also lucky to find out you have a disorder, that with hard work, you will be able to control.

Chin up....and keep up the hard work!!!

Masquerade,

Welcome home from the hospital! It’s terrific you are back on your feet, heading back to your salon business and moving your life ahead.

I’m glad you felt you finally got some deep therapy, and it touched off in you a strong reaction. It’s great that you identified some past issues (“rarely having been given the opportunity to be taken seriously”) and how that may be affecting you today. You have put in the hard work it takes to identify the issues that you, as an intelligent adult, can work through and around, to avoid maladaptive behavior, and have a better life in the future. That’s got to feel good!

I hope you will think back of your trip to the hospital. Try to think of each day and each event in exact time sequence, just as it unfolded and how you felt about each step. Ruminate on what you connected with and what seemed to be pretty much a waste of time. What finally “hit home”? On reexamination and carefully relaxed rumination, what were the things and process that lead up to your “conversion” points?

If there is emotional content that still seems “on the edge” of your belief, or that deeply impacted you in any way, feel free to express that over and over, as many times and as long as it takes to process through it. Cut yourself some real slack here as it may take a bit of time to all come out.

The prior thread Who actually has HPD? (janey, scarlett1939, miss meow? …)has some really terrific content. Take a minute and re-read what you have posted and perhaps that will help you build some mental coherence from where you were to where you are now, and demonstrate to you how progress is actually made.

On that prior thread Scarlett1939 has posted some of the very best reflections I’ve ever seen! She really drilled down to the depths of the root causes of some of the HPD traits. They are clinical textbook quality accounts that helps not only her but others by showing that there are some specific patterns to HPD. You have to go back as an adult and repair where that pattern got off track from normal to “disordered.” As she is clearly showing, that can be done! A very wide audience will benefit from reading her very skillful and extremely well “verbalized” accounts.

It takes real courage to “exhume” what was covered up and buried deep, only to discover OMG, there is a live little girl under all this crap!!! It’s a miracle she survived all that, but she’s actually alive and O.K.! Even better, now that we have her fully exhumed, cleaned up, and relaxed, despite being a bit immature in some select “childish” areas (mostly intense fears), she is, in every other respect, a full grown adult woman, with a full adult intellect now! If we can just set up some mirrors around her, allowing her to peer into some former blind spots, her adult mind can reach in and help heal up the childhood injuries. The “part-girl-but-mostly-fully-grown-woman” can fairly rapidly integrate new understanding, so she can go forth as a total, full woman, totally free from most of that little girl baggage.

Hope you will find some time to reflect and ruminate on your hospital trip. If you can express things in words and writings, it may help you even further process them. Your posting here could help others too. Lets face it, many with HPD, if it goes untreated, will be hospitalized some time in their lifetime. Some will end up going numerous times. Any trip to the hospital is traumatic for everyone. Your postings here could really help reduce the anxiety of going. Plus, many thousands of HPD sufferers will not be able to ever fund a hospital trip, your postings might help them achieve some of the benefits.

Again, welcome home! A big cheer to you, and huge kudos to your sister and husband for all their great support! Hope your trip back to the Salon helps boost the self-esteem of many of your “feeling-a-bit-depressed” hair care customers, and that boost is very fulfilling to you too. We all know hairdressers also have to be pretty darn good psychologists!