Rick,
Something in your thread really hit the right points, for many people my age, 60-ish, we were brought up on a basis of accepting the stress, and the duty of doing things 'right', often at a huge cost to our inner selves, not because we wanted to do 'wrong' instead, but because getting it right meant putting everything before ourselves. And I mean everything. This is especially true for women bringing up families, and men providing for those families. Often this is seen as a one-way street, but actually those places of responsibility that we were expected to accept with no real knowledge or understanding of their implication were drilled into us at such an early age, and while there was for women a long running dialogue that offered gateways to empowerment, it sometimes seems that for men that dialogue didn't happen in the same way, so there is less recognition of the stressors that make up the conditioning that they too underwent.

When something life-changing occurs, that shatters all those myths, then we can really stand outside of them.

For me the double-edged sword that cut through the illusions were my partners descent into mental health problems, and my own PD. IT was only once those two had taken my life and changed it forever that I could see what must have been obvious to others - that the level of stress was incredibly high, the responsibility I had taken on was unrealistic, and that there were prices to pay for that.

But you don't know that when you strike your bargain with life at 7 or 15 or 18, or whenever it is that you take up that inner challenge. Sometimes you don't even remember when you do it. The moment you read a verse at sunday school, or took a childhood pledge, or promised something that in ignorance you would never be able to fulfill, and took on a lifetime of anxiety, fear and guilt with it. It could have been reading a picture book with your mom, and a value is lodged into your psyche forever. And it is not that it is there that is the problem. It is the unrestricted way that we often decide to implement it that causes the stress. But we don't know that till later!

It wasn't until I stepped outside of the enchanted circle of my marriage, that had once been the closest and best thing in my life, but which had turned, in the wake of my partners devastating mental health issues, into my worst nightmare, that I realized that my own perseverance and tolerance for taking on the impossible were making me very very unwell. Removing myself and my child from that situation has done at least as much for me as my medication, what is left is damage I have not found a way to repair. It was far from easy, and went against the grain of everything I had embedded in my life as being 'right'. I came to realize that it also meant that I would have to re-define most of what I believe in. In the strangest way PD gave me a place in which I could do that. Bradyphrenia sometimes has it's advantages. Things become a little more essential!

I suspect that this is the cause of a lot of chronic conditions, and has nothing to do with natural resilience, or a bounceback ability to survive, but pushing ourselves way past that point in the service of things such as duty, responsibility, our place in society, our response to the expectations of others, and losing our own personal way in the world. In someways PD has snapped me back to the person I could have been all along, and I am grateful to it for that.

The cycle of loss that you describe so well, Rick, is something that I recognize very well. I am aware that there are more losses to come, but I am outside of that cycle, not fighting righteous battles anymore, not being the good child, but being more ordinarily real, someone with limitations who can see the limitless...... For me that has made a big difference.......

Thank you for starting this thread,

Lindy