Category Archives: finding yourself

Taking stock of yourself. Posts about self-discovery

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Self

Getting to know yourself.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Here are links to posts about self-discovery and getting to know yourself.

I decided to post this list to help you find some of the past posts on this important subject. There will be additional posts on the topic of finding out “Who are you?” as we progress through the year.

Eventually, my plan is to pull all these posts together into a longer document, maybe even a book. Only time will tell. If you have other suggestions on how to get in touch with yourself, that old inventory process, feel free to leave a comment.

How sure are you about that goal?

Finding your Quest – what life challenge will define you?

Inventorying your baggage

What do you most want in your life?

Your autobiography as therapy

How heavy is your baggage – Unpacking your baggage

Would a Genie help? Happiness by magic

Who are you? Who do you want to be?

5 things you need to ask yourself about mistakes to avoid making them again

Are you original or ordinary?

Are you successful?

How did you know that? When and where we learn things matters.

Every day is April Fools’ Day when you are fooling yourself

Hope that helps.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Is it the Bipolar or is it me? Confusion and self-doubt.

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Who am I?
Photo courtesy of pixabay.

The struggles to find you when you have Bipolar or another mental illness.

People who grow up with a mental illness have a difficult time finding out who they are separate from their disorder. The younger you are when the symptoms start the more difficult it is to find out who you are during those times the symptoms are at a severe point. People with other mental illnesses may experience this same confusion but it is easiest to illustrate by discussing the effects of Bipolar Disorder on self-doubt.

Youth with Bipolar disorder have a second set of tasks to navigate over and above those all teen’s experience. Finding you who you are is a necessary task of adolescence. Much of that sense of self is developed as a result of the experiences you have. For the person with Bipolar Disorder, the person who has those experiences changes depending on the severity of symptoms.

In the early stages of the disorder, the disease goes largely undiagnosed. The person who will someday get that bipolar diagnosis may spend 20 years or more struggling with out of control emotions before they discover that those unpredictable mood swings are a result of their disease, not some defect in who they are.

When you have symptoms, try to control them, but find you are out of control more than in, it is easy to begin to doubt yourself and to begin to hate yourself. Before receiving their diagnosis many youths with Bipolar Disorders have been led to believe they are “bad kids” and that they should be able to do things they find far outside their abilities.

The person with Bipolar Disorder will experience a large discrepancy between who they are supposed to be and who they are. Despite their best efforts, who they feel they are, will change depending on whether they are in a manic, hypomanic, depressive, or mixed phase.

The peak onset for Bipolar is between fifteen and nineteen years of age, precisely those late teen years when you need to establish who you are as a separate person from your caregivers and friends.

The earlier the onset of Bipolar Disorder the more difficult it becomes to define what is the disorder and what part of these feelings and behaviors are you.

Often the person with Bipolar will report that they don’t know how they feel. A given situation will make them feel happy one day and sad or angry the next. This creates extreme self-doubt.

Having a mind or body that betrays you can lead to self-hate. In the early stages of Bipolar Disorder, before the diagnosis, there is a high risk that you will come to hate yourself for having uncontrollable and unpredictable moods.

Clients sometimes report during a severe episode “This is not who I am.” They have the feeling that there are three or more of them, the depressed person, the manic person and sometimes there is that person that is them without the symptoms.

Someone with Bipolar Disorder may find that they shift between being an introvert and being an extrovert depending on the state of their illness. They can easily become confused as to which is the real them.

After a particularly manic episode or a really low depressive episode, the person with Bipolar Disorder may find themselves saying “That is not me, I don’t want to be like that.”

The result of all these conflicts in their self-image can leave a person in the early phase of Bipolar Disorder with negative self-beliefs. These beliefs are likely to persist into adulthood and then change slowly if at all. The person that they find themselves to be on medication or after therapy is a whole different person to the previous untreated person.

One risk for the undiagnosed person is the tendency to become a chameleon. Not knowing who they really are deep down they try to blend in and assume the roles of others around them. This results in an unstable self that is one way today and another tomorrow.

A common refrain is “I don’t like myself.” Or “I can’t do anything right.” Shaking these beliefs and sorting out who you are separate from your disorder is a difficult but necessary process.

Because of the mood swings between depression and mania the person with bipolar disorder faces unique challenges in finding who they really are separate from their diagnosis.

People with other mental and emotional problems will expertise these conflicts in varying ways. The key task is to learn that you are not your diagnosis and that your condition does not define who and what you will become.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Who are you? Who do you want to be?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Self-Exploration

Self-Exploration
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Planning the destination for your life’s journey.

We are now into the new year.

Some of you made resolutions for New Year and some of you didn’t.

Either way, these first breaths of the new year are a good time to take a look at yourself, your life, and what you want it to be.

A first place to start is to take a hard look at ourselves. Most of us are used to muddling along, trying to remember those directions in our head but never really putting them down on paper and being sure of the direction we need to take. Now is a time to change that.

We have talked about happiness and over this year defining happiness and finding ways to get there are high on our agenda. But you can’t start any journey until you know where you are. In twelve-step terms, this is called an inventory and there are specific directions in the books on how to do this. In the language of therapy, we might call this an assessment.

I am not suggesting that you need to become an expert on diagnosis to move to happiness. Guess what? There are counselors who are not happy. The precise definition of your issue is not as important as your own appraisal of where you have been and how can you move forward from that place. We will break this process up into some steps.

One way to begin work on this life improvement project would be to begin creating a manual for your life. While we are all willing to contribute to this work, you as the expert on your life need to do the work of assembling this manual. Personally, I use a loose-leaf binder and paper to keep this record. This allows me to make lists, revise them, and move them around. This is sometimes called a sectional journal.

Some of the things you will have thought about so far are:

1. What will make you really truly happy?

This is all about finding real lasting happiness. As you will probably soon find, this is not about taking shortcuts and momentary pleasures. Your life journey should include some of those “right now” fun times, but it needs a longer range goal to give it meaning and purpose.

2. What does success mean to you?

Lots of us find we are taking someone else’s journey and therefore never get where we wanted to go. You need to decide for yourself what would make you happy and what success means to you. That is the destination part of the process.

You may begin by deciding to do something that you have never done before. For some people, they will find they have never finished a project they started, never completed school. They will decide that is where they need to go – for now. You may decide to finish your high school diploma or get a GED.

Later, once you get to this destination, it does not mean the journey is over. In life, we keep reevaluating and then setting new goals.

3. How will you know if your life changes?

Therapists call this the “miracle question.” If one morning a miracle was to occur and your life’s problems were all solved, how would we know this? What would be different?

All last year we talked about diseases and disorders, the problems of living. Maybe for a good part of your life, you have had nothing but struggles. So my asking you to imagine a happy successful life, that may be a bit of a stretch.

Give it a try anyway.

Make up a list of things that would be different. Write this list down if it is safe to do so. If you don’t feel safe in making lists and writing them down, then tackling that lack of safety is the first thing you need to do.

Is this fear about you or about them? If it is only about you then take a chance, write down anything. It does not need to be complete or even right. It just needs to reflect how you feel right now. Tomorrow is a new day and you can revise these lists at any point.

If you find that the fear is about them, the others in your life, then you either need to reword the things you write so you will not care if they read them or you may really need to consider if this is such a bad relationship that you need to run not walk away. In that case, reach out for professional help.

So you write down that first provisional list. Things that I would like to be different in my life. Try to keep that list between 3 and 10 things. If it gets longer than that take the list and save it but makeup draft number two by combining things down.

Say your list came up with 8 bills you want to pay off and 3 things you would like to replace you might simplify this by saying 1. Reduce my bills 2. Save up enough money to replace some things. Now you have two doable goals.

There may be some other things that some of you need to do.

One thing that would be wise to do is think about these goals. Will accomplishing them really take you to a place of happiness? We should talk soon about values. These goals of your happy life should be consistent with your values, religious and spiritual as well as material. It won’t do to achieve your happy life goals only to find that to reach them you needed to turn into a person even you don’t like.

By now most of you who are reading this have lived a while. You may have a lot of pain from your life so far. In popular language, you may have some baggage that will hold you back on this happy life journey. We will need to talk about how to leave some baggage behind and how to unpack some to lighten the load.

So let’s go there next.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

When you were born did you get your instruction book?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Books for sale

Books.
Photo courtesy of pixabay.

Did you get your life’s instruction book?

With most important things, when you make the purchase you get an instruction book. When you buy a new mower, you get a book.  When you buy a barbecue, you get a book. When I came home from the hospital I don’t think I got a book.

It would have been nice to get an instruction manual for life when I was born. How about you? Did you get an instruction book that told you what to do and where to go? Wouldn’t that have been helpful?

Such a book should include warnings – don’t do that with your life, it can be painful.

So often I feel like I am making this life up as I go along. You would think the instructions would have been clearer. Should I move here or there? Which relationships should I get into and which should I avoid. It would be nice to have instructions to known about the warnings without having to make the mistakes and suffer the pain of yet another learning experience.

Some hospitals used to give out books to new parents, what to do, and not do to be a good parent. Most of those books described the “typical” child and the “average” parent. “Typical” and “average” are rare things – almost as rare as those elusive “normal” people.

People who were given those baby-raising books, or bought one, report that the books were only marginally helpful. Not that you should do without one. If by some chance of luck you get a book that tells you how to raise a child and the system works, cherish that book. Just most of the time the book describes things that don’t happen, and your child is doing things that don’t sound like anything in the book.

Think of those baby-raising books more like field guides to the fauna of childhood than any accurate plan for raising your child right.  Books that describe developmentally appropriate parenting and life stages give you a guide to things some or many children a certain age do or should be able to do. As for your child, the writer of that book knows no more than the child does about how he may act tomorrow.

Which should you spring for, sports equipment, music lessons, or tutoring in algebra? Do everything right and your child may become famous for something you forgot to provide for him and may fail at the thing you put all that time and effort into. Kids are like that, so are adults.

The older the child gets, the less helpful the book becomes. Give that child a year, and just as you get them figured out they will have changed.

By the time your child is grown the book is hopelessly out of date, or the child is.

Most of the people who come to see me for counseling report they not only didn’t they get a book on how to be a parent they got even less information on how to grow up. So we teach our kids the lessons we learned from them about being a parent and leave the how-to grow up and have a happy life for them to figure out.

Despite all the books out there on how to live and how to have a happy life we still all need to live, make choices, and learn from our mistakes as well as our successes.

So consider all those self-help books – mine included, as books of suggestions. Try on the things that are suggested but feel free to discard anything that doesn’t work.

So many of my plans for a great life didn’t work out the way I planned them. I think that may be why the hospital neglected to give me that instruction book for my life. The full instructions are still being tested and improved.

Hope you are successful at designing and constructing a happy life for yourself. Remember there is time to write another chapter right up till the Great Editor adds the “The end.”

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel