Acknowledging your feelings

Read Time:3 Minute, 54 Second

By Rachael

Acknowledging your feelings is probably one of the most daunting things, well for me anyway. Sitting there and saying out loud, “I’m not actually okay, I feel ….” brings another load of emotions in itself. I’ve got so used to having my thoughts and feelings trampled on by both professionals and those closest to me when I was younger, I’ve found it hard to open up since. I do believe at times those working with me just feel that they are fighting a losing battle.

‘Other people have worse things going on’

Starting off at CAMHS (child and adolescent mental health service) was the start, on my journey into mental health services. I wonder what would have happened if someone had actually said that it is okay to not be okay. Would I have been able to share exactly what was going on in my teenage brain? I will never now, but instead I got the message I had to be okay. They made me feel like I was an attention-seeker or that my worries around how I felt about myself were not just.

I was told I was stable; other people had worse things going on in their lives. There was no major concerns. However, a year after my diagnosis of anorexia I was hospitalised due to how far out of control things were. My parents couldn’t cope with me at home and point blank refused to have me home.

‘We cannot be dealing with you’

Some of the hospital staff were lovely. I was on a medical paediatric ward at my local general hospital; they were doing their best with very limited resources. However, more often than not the message was, “We have very poorly patients on this ward and cannot be dealing with you”. I was just as poorly as many of those children; however, with me you couldn’t see it.

I didn’t have a grumbling appendix or a broken leg which needed surgery. I had a voice screaming in my head, telling me I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t deserve to eat and I would be better off dead. When I did try to tell people this I was just looked at, or had the response, “But you have so much to live for”, or, “You know it’s not true”. The truth was, I didn’t know it wasn’t true. That voice had so much power over me.

I almost died

My anorexia led me to be nasally fed. At one point I was given 48 hours to live. Yet still at times, I was treated like I still wasn’t sick enough. Even when I tried to end my life in 2009, I woke up screaming and was told “You need to stop that”. What I needed was someone just to hold me and just hear my struggle. I was screaming because of the realisation I had not been successful in taking my own life.

Recently, I’ve realised how my struggle is still sometimes as raw as that day in 2009. That maybe if I did just scream at some point, would I still be told to stop it? I understand that screaming isn’t the solution to let people know or hear your frustration, but what if that’s the only way to be heard, if words are just too hard?

I’m allowed to be feeling the way I am

I feel lucky at the minute that the service I’m under haven’t just dismissed my feelings, I’ve actually been able to find the courage in saying I’m not okay. To be at that point takes hard work from a practitioner, in my opinion, especially when they know how downtrodden someone has been throughout their journey with services before they actually reached them.

I have days when I think I’d hate to be the person receiving me for therapy, then I have to remind myself I’m allowed to be feeling the way I am. I am frustrated. I’m sad. I’m scared. I am who I am. When you start acknowledging your feelings and start to share, a small part of that weight you are carrying on your shoulder goes. It happens slowly, but it happens.

There are so many different ways for feelings to be expressed, song lyrics, poems, quotes, characters in stories… the list could be endless, and I suppose it’s down to finding the ones which best suit you. The important thing is to get them out. Don’t bottle them up and feel so on your own that you can’t tell anyone.