YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Excellent news! I hope her recovery continues. I know Paul says often that "no one understands us like our pillow" but I think "no one understands us like our pets."

Despite feeling like I had a decent amount of recovery under my belt when I had my appearance on the show, the past year -- particularly the time in stay-at-home due to COVID-19 -- has produced so much more recovery. As part of this recovery I've started attending a new 12-step fellowship that reall...

Hi SD - absolutely pets count. I honestly think I am still grieving a cat of mine that died in January 2016 without me being able to properly mourn and say goodbye. So, please be gentle with yourself as this sounds like it is really difficult for you.

A similar one I recently heard on a Buddhism podcast I listen to. It is a play on the phrase “mind the gap” in the London Underground and goes “gap the mind.”

Insert a pause into reactivity to give oneself a moment to get out of the reactivity pattern and act more skillfully.

I've been gone for a while because sometimes my brain shuts down certain healthy behaviors in my life (even if I know they are "good" for me) and recently it was coming to these boards for a while. I don't know why, my brain just did. In the past month or so since I've been gone I've had s...

From my therapist: "you don't have to meet urgency with urgency." That is, if someone else is reactive and pumped up/anxious, we don't have to get as reactive as they are. It's okay to stay calm and handle situations in our own way. She said this to me because I was continuing to fall into...

As they say on the rooms “progress not perfection “

I had no idea about that book. I just purchased the eBook version of it on Barnes & Noble. I will start reading it this weekend. I hope that it can shed some insight on things for me.

Thanks for the kind reply manuel_moe_g. I always feel so slimy when I speak those kinds of words because something in my internal programming tells me that I was just doing it to get pity/sympathy rather than being honest or genuine. That's why I like posting here - I know that the people on these b...

Thanks for posting that, Beany Boo. That segment with the still faced mother was so hard for me to watch because it brought up a very somatic experience of what it was like growing up in my family of origin. It's not just the neglect like Dr Jonice Webb talks about, it's the "smug" and ind...