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

What a lovable person and perfect guest. I could listen to Maggie for hours, with the way she talks. She reminds me of my female therapist. I'm also on Wellbutrin for dysthymic depression since I was 15 (I'm 32), and really identified with Maggie's depression.

I totally agree. I'm on my second listen now and a few takeaways for me, when the topic of self-esteem & needing compliments came up, my feeling (unfortunately) is, I don't have the right to feel that I'm a good person, unless others feel that I'm a good person. I know, that's totally unhealthy, but I've argued with myself over that a lot, and lost every time. If I walk around thinking about how great I am, but nobody wants to hang out with me or have me around, aren't I just bullshitting myself?

I do have a new motto tho, to kind of counterbalance that. "I may suck, but I'm all I got."

And I can't find the part specifically, so I'm sure I'm going to butcher it, but talking about how it feels like everything we do in life needs to be a home run. I think that's because we think we're less. And, doubles and triples may be OK for the regular people, but for us, we're special cases in that we're just not as good as them, so when we get up to bat, we have to knock it out of the park every time, to compensate for our lessness. I think. That's my feeling anyway.

I had a couple more but I can't recall them right now.

Oh yes I remember now, "Just be yourself." Another one of those annoying platitudes from the 70s & 80s that they used to call "guidance."

I'm trying to think of some other examples but my brain is too fried. Seems like "Just be yourself" was fucking evvvverywhere. In the 70s, when I was growing up it was all over the PBS shows like Sesame Street and Mr Rogers and Zoom, and in school there were Little Golden Books about it, the teacher would cut letters out of cardboard that spelled it out and stick them up on the wall. And then satisfactorily say, "There! I've done my job!"

And what the fuck does... it... mean?

OK, a) I wasn't planning on it and 2) I was a little kid I wouldn't have known how to be somebody else even if I wanted to. But, thanks anyway!!

Maggie articulated so much that I've been feeling but haven't been able to put into words. Really spot on. I'm thinking of making my husband listen to it just so I can be like, "this. This is what I mean."

On the parenting thing she talks about - how she's not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that her parents acknowledged her limitations and so didn't push her too hard - I SO wish my parents had done that. It would have made my life growing up, and my life now, SO MUCH easier. They're both very, very athletic people, and I'm a)just kind of a nerd, and b)have just a ton of health crap going on that makes it difficult for me to participate in physical activities. My parents' way of dealing with this was to try and "break me" of the "weakness" by signing me up for every fucking sport until the day the coach/Sensei/ballet instructor pulled them aside and said, "Look, it's just not working out with little Tintaglia," and then it was on to the next one. (This was similar to their pattern with any therapist they sent me to who suggested that maybe it wasn't all my fault.) To this day, I struggle with guilt issues about my epilepsy and chronic pain. My husband and therapist have to remind me how ridiculous I sound when I say "maybe I wouldn't be this way if I had just worked out more like my parents said."

What I wouldn't give to have had them just let me do theatre club.

Wow, Tintaglia, it sounds like your folks' parenting philosophy was "full speed ahead in all directions!" With a smattering of desperately-grasping-at-straws.

You actually just reminded me of another one of those annoying 70s platitudes: "You can be anything you want to be when you grow up."

Even when I was little I knew that one was bullshit.

I think when parents micromanage like yours did with the sports it interferes with the child's ability to get to know herself, and also interferes with developing that skill where you learn how to listen to your instincts and trust them. I have neither of those skills today. I was also micromanaged growing up, in a variety of ways. Mine fixated on certain sports and pushed them on me, but then in other weird ways, too. Like, my social relationships were managed. When I was little, during the rare, rare times where I was making any friends at school at all, my parents would tell me to stop talking to that kid. They would say, "I met so-and-so's parents and what a couple of know-it-alls." <or "connivers," or "social climbers" or some other term me, as a little kid, had no fucking idea what they were talking about, or what that had to do with me.>

So, then I would go to school thinking about how I'd better not talk to so-and-so. Oh, but it felt so right, and I was so comfortable doing it, but I'd have to remind myself, no, stay away. And then that traumatizes the other kid, too, because he doesn't know why this new kid he met was blowing him off.

I wonder if parents are still screwing up today the same ways they screwed up 30, 40 years ago, or if they've invented new, spectacular ways to fuck with their kids' heads.

Oh dear. I just realized that when I said this:

I don't have the right to feel that I'm a good person, unless others feel that I'm a good person.

...that this is a hugely co-dependent statement.

I just got Facing Codependence by Pia Mellody, and I've been reading it all weekend and it is super enlightening.

So, I'm learning that I am actually codependent. And my statement I made a couple of weeks ago is a trait of "other-esteem," a trait that co-dependents have in place of "self-esteem." It involves forming your feelings about yourself based on external factors.

It starts in childhood when primary caregivers send the message that their children are 'less-than' people. Then, as we go into adulthood, that stays with us, and so we get into a habit of looking for signs and signals from our peers that our caregivers were wrong, and we're really not 'less-than,' we are in fact 'equal-to!' We look for signals like acceptance and getting invited to things and people wanting to spend time with us and be honest with us. I guess those are the signals I look for, anyway. But when we don't get those signs and signals, we go back to feeling 'less-than.'

This can lead us to personalizing the things that we see around us. And that isn't healthy because now we're taking in things we see and hear from our peers and making them about us, when in reality they may not be about us at all. And doing all that mental work all the time wears us down and creates mental fatigue, making it harder to be a good observer of our thoughts and be mindful.

I feel like a bit of an a-hole here, but I was bugged by Maggie's episode. I felt like, "So, you have weird feet and a tad bit of depression. Why are you on here?". It also seemed like a lot of what she said was just shallow and due to her age/insecurity.

I feel the same way about a lot of guests. I listen to their story and I think, "Well, at least you've got a fulfilling career and friends and family and you're getting the help you need." I'm starting to think I'm just too bitter a person to appreciate this podcast anymore. I guess because I've stopped believing recovery is possible for me recovery stories just make me jealous and sad.

The show gives me hope, especially the episodes like this about anxiety and depression. Just listening to someone talk about how they experience their anxieties and their depression is comforting, even if they have more financial and social resources than I do. And Paul stops them and asks them just the right questions and to expand on the things that are important for me to hear. I love that Paul gets such great detail out of the guests, I think he's really good at that.

Limited Adventure, like you, this one resonated with me so much. The perfectionism, constant low level depression, hating the term "just be yourself", having your self worth all tied up in your work (which I thought was just a man thing), etc. There's a lot more and I'm listening to it for the second time now because there's so many points she made that are exactly how I view the world and myself. I have to remember these for my coaching and therapy sessions.