Mindset In Psychotropic Drug Withdrawal
Today more than ever, there are many helpful and free, online peer support communities offering information about how to taper psychiatric drugs safely and how to cope with withdrawal symptoms. But, it must be understood that in these groups, there are people from all walks of life, from all over the world, with different experiences coming together to try to help each other and most are injured or in withdrawal themselves. This can be a double-edged sword. While peer support is crucial, helpful, and needed, exposing ourselves to material that provokes a stress response or adds fear to our situation can impact our mindset and scare us. While these groups are literally lifesaving and are needed to learn about the complexities of deprescribing, there are some groups (or specific people) that are breeding grounds for fear that can complicate our own recovery process. Scary posts (or people who scare us) should be avoided if possible. I know it sounds harsh but this can be life or death for some of us - for me, anyone who scared me or said certain words, was blocked immediately. I could not entertain anything that scared me more than I already was and I did my best to protect myself from the topics that triggered a fear response.
Last year, I did videos about toxic positivity and toxic negativity. Neither are good things to entertain during the psychotropic drug withdrawal process. Just as we are selective about the food we consume and friends we attempt to socialize with when possible, we must protect our minds from losing focus and hope.
So, the next time your brain repeats the following (because I hear this every day from my clients and had the same thoughts myself) we DO NOT listen to them or we challenge them:
This is permanent
I will never heal from this
I am special case because ______ makes me different from all the other people who have healed
I will lose my mind, die of no sleep, end up in a psych ward, go psychotic, and all the other imaginations that we have
That is NOT the Healing Mindset. That is the scary mind garbage that is tapering and withdrawing. It’s a symptom just like the pain in your muscles or the burning in your arms.
I like to think of the Healing Mindset at its core, is the following:
You will heal from this. It may take some time, but healing is inevitable. Thousands of people have healed from this before you and thousands will come after you. There is no perfect way or perfect method or program or protocol you need to do to heal. Your body is self-healing and it is our job to stay out of its way.
Anything else that your mind tells you or that others scare you will is FALSE and should not be marinated on, thought about, entertained, or googled about. I know - it’s easier said than done, so we do it as much as we can, when we can. We constantly challenge our fears, our doubts, we lose hope, we find it again, we carry on without it until it returns. And we do this day in and day out, until we don’t have to anymore.
Some reading (or audiobooks or authors to follow on YouTube) to help you grow stronger in keeping the distance between your thoughts, your behavior and your mindset, and the books that helped me the most with this set of symptoms were:
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
Anxiety RX by Russel Kennedy
To see more audio / book suggestions, you can check out my reading list through Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/shop/angiepeacockmswcpc?ref=ac_inf_tb_vh
*I receive a small commission of the normal price as an Amazon Influencer
