I have been wanting to come back and tell you how I’m really doing now, and get into the details of that. What is life like for me, day to day, two and a half years out from getting off psych meds?
In the middle of withdrawal, you think you’re screwed. Like this is as good as it gets. Your brain is broken, you’re debilitated. Or maybe there’ll be slight improvement, but you’ve pretty much wrecked your brain and your life. That is so not true.
Healing doesn’t mean you’re still living a miserable existence. It means you actually feel better, your life feels better, your perspective’s better.
I offering support groups and 1:1 coaching for those going through withdrawal. If you’d like someone to walk with you through this season, I would love to meet with you. My withdrawal was brutal. I know how dark it can get. I also know how real healing is. I’m now in a place of joy, health, and full life, and I want to support you on your way there.
👉 Go here to see my calendar and register
When Withdrawal Makes Life Look Nightmarish
One thing I’m learning is that it’s super common to have circumstantial stuff happening at the same time, because we’re all in the middle of our lives when this happens.
Whatever your life stage challenges are, withdrawal can make those normal or hard life challenges look like the most nightmarish, impossible, gruesome, dark, dooming outcomes possible. It takes something hard and makes it feel catastrophic and insurmountable.
A Move and Feeling Trapped
For me, I had moved to a rural area with my family before I went off meds. It was part of this idea of pursuing a better, healthier lifestyle. I had these ongoing depressive episodes, including one that lasted a year. Now I know it was withdrawal stuff because of a med change, but at the time I had no idea what was actually going on.
After the move, I felt extreme despair about my circumstances, like I was trapped and it was hopeless. I looped around that a lot, and there didn’t seem to be any clear solution. Nothing was clear. It was completely muddled, terror and agony. It was very hard to make decisions then. It’s like a big pause button on your life. You just have to heal.
Identity, Parenting, and Spiritual Terror
I also had huge identity doubt. Was I compromised by the meds? Were my life choices because of the meds? I questioned my parenting. Did I parent badly on the meds?
Basically every area of my life felt like a bomb went off, and I couldn’t figure out what was even right or true or good.
I had spiritual doubt, moral anxiety about decisions in the past, distortions about God. I feared the best days of my life were in the past. I feared I had done something irredeemable to deserve some sort of cosmic punishment or torment.
I had incredible grief over the years when my kids were younger, delusional regret, like I did everything wrong and all the best days were over and nothing else good could come. I felt trapped in my brain, trapped in my body, trapped in my circumstances, trapped where I lived. Fear I wasted my life. Fear the future was dismal and nothing else good could happen to me. My perspective was so jacked about everything.
When “Mental Health Tools” Don’t Work
I even went to therapy, thinking, okay, what do you do when you’re having mental health problems? You go to therapy, you read books, you journal, maybe you need the hospital.
None of that was an option for me.
I could not talk to a therapist. I felt horrendously worse after. No reading books, I could hardly read. I could sound out words, but I could not comprehend them. No journaling, I very occasionally could, but I felt terror about it. My own thoughts were full of terror for me, and writing them down felt overwhelming.
No hospital either, because my concept was, if it’s really bad, you need a hospital, meds, therapists. And I was sitting there like, how will I exist? I’m trained as a therapist, that’s what I knew.
It became a major breakup, not only from the meds, but from the whole philosophy of mental health in popular culture. It was a wake up call. I was like, if this is false, then how did people exist before therapists and medication? What did humans do when they lived through horrible atrocities, and were still alive after? How did they keep living so much so that we are alive today?
Back to Basics Survival Mode: Minute by Minute
It felt like a call to go back to the basics.
I asked people who survived it, what did they do to survive it? And it was really simple stuff, but really hard to do moment to moment.
Stay alive. Another minute. Breathe another minute.
Maybe for a while you’re living minute by minute or second by second. Then you string those along, and soon you’re living a little bit longer stretches.
Back to basics looked like ordinary things: walking outside barefoot, drinking hot tea, crying out all your tears. Moment to moment.
You feel like, I can’t live this way forever. But you’re not going to be this way forever. Your job is just to stay alive right now, just this moment. That’s it. Then the next moment, you muddle through it. One day it won’t be that intolerable. Your joy will come back. You’ll laugh again. You’ll go have fun. You won’t even be thinking about this anymore.
So much of my surviving was love. I’m going to stay alive because there are people I love. If all you can do is stay alive right now, that is your act of love. That is your gift to the world, I’m staying alive through this.
Little bits of hope helped too, stories of hope. A strategy for coping moment to moment, getting through the day. The list of things you can do grows as you heal.
At first there was so little. I was like mono and agoraphobic. Afraid to be alone, but also afraid to leave my house. It feels contradictory, but it was just moment to moment existence: is there somebody I can call? Can I be around somebody? Sometimes you don’t even have to talk. Being around someone can help you regulate a little bit, feel a little more safe.
The Turning Point: Travel as a Catalyst for Healing
There were several turning points. One was around 18 months.
At around 18 months, we had a vacation planned and I still wasn’t better. I was functioning, but I did not feel like I had my normal mind back. I had windows, less intensity, but it was this dance: symptoms and doing life, back and forth.
In a group call, travel came up, and I heard that travel can be very healing. Even if you’re not 100%, travel can be part of healing. That gave me confidence to go.
I still felt bad. But I decided to consider travel part of contributing to healing.
I went on the trip and it was a turning point for me. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe a new environment, distraction, different thoughts, a sense of possibility. Wonder. A jump out of the rut. I think my healing had gotten far enough that the change of scenery could help me into the next stage.
If I had done that in acute, I was a zombie. My head was filled with torment. I was trying to hold my mouth shut to not let it out on everyone constantly. But this time, I had enough healing behind me, and my brain was ready to start thinking about other things.
Joy Returns: Magic, Wonder, and Real Windows
I was able to enjoy myself on that vacation.
And guys, I had not enjoyed a vacation. For years I’d say, I don’t like trips and vacations, I don’t know why. We’d do day trips and even those felt stressful. I didn’t feel wonder and warm fuzzies. I even had panic attacks while medicated.
Then there I was, 18 months in, and I was having an amazing time with my kids. I felt a sense of magic and wonder.
I still had waves. I’d get sad, or have a hard cry, or moments of terror. But it would be like one of those cries where you cry, then you can think about something else after. There were longer stretches where I was actually thinking about what we were doing, having a really good time.
The hard stuff was shrinking significantly. When it would happen, I had more sense that it wasn’t the whole story. I could feel, not just say, maybe I’m going to be okay after all of this.
Life Unpauses: A Job Offer, A Big Move, Normal Emotions
Then the circumstantial stuff started unfolding.
My husband was asked to have a job, and it was even in one of the places we visited on vacation. It was like a solution I couldn’t see in that time. It was a crucible, a surrendering time, praying there were solutions, hoping something good could come out of it.
Withdrawal can feel like a huge painful pause button, like a cliffhanger on pause. You’re like, is this ever going to resolve? You need encouragement that it will, because it feels so prolonged. But it really will.
We moved across the country, and I look back like, oh my gosh, it’s so wild. But it’s been amazing, and I’ve been fully alive for it. I’ve been able to meet life for what it is, hard feelings and joys, and be present for it.
I still had moments of being nervous, kind of like a breakdown, but they quickly became normal amounts of stress or fear. I could have a cry and move on. Then I could focus on everything going on in my life and enjoy sweet things in my life, like a good walk, the breeze. More and more things became in the moment, in the actual experience, not tormenting thoughts while trying to be in the experience.
All my fears about worst case scenario, ruining their lives, ruining my life, the end of everything, it just isn’t the story. Humans are resilient. You can go through life transitions and hard times and recover and be doing really, really well.
My husband calls the withdrawal thoughts “fake news.” As you heal, you see how much of it is fake news. Then you get the real scoop on your life.
30 Months Out: The Texture of Life Now
So what is it like now, around 30 months?
I genuinely love my life.
I get up in the morning, make coffee, and go for a walk with my husband around this beautiful lake. As I’m walking, I’m like, these birds are so beautiful. I notice the trees, the water. I talk about my day.
I spend time with my kids. I meet up with friends. I help with our church. I can engage in all of those things, be present for them, actually enjoy them, feel normal, talk to people.
You reemerge socially and you’re like, oh, that’s who I am.
The Medicated Years, Vitality, and What Changed
Right now in withdrawal, it can feel like an identity crisis. Who even am I? That is the withdrawal.
Then you look back on your medicated years and you’re not so hard on yourself. I can see that I was myself. I think parts of me were numbed, so I had a reduced experience, dulled down. But I wasn’t completely numbed.
Now I have more vitality. More joy. More presence. More appreciation for my life. More in the moment. More appreciation for people, relationships, and ordinary good gifts.
I have a different perspective of mental health, resilience, what it means to be human. You can mine this for all it’s worth, because there is gold in this. Costly, but rich.
I would take this any day over being numbed out the rest of my life and out of touch with what was true. It gets so much better, and you can see good coming through your suffering.
You are going to get there. There’s so much for you. Please hang in there.
❤️🩹 Joanna