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My mom died recently. She was young; I am still in my twenties and she was in her fifties. She was my best friend. There's a quote or something (or I possibly made it up, who knows) about how when someone dies, for the rest of your life they will only be further away. I can't deal with that. She was my best friend. And she died so painfully, so horribly, so needlessly. I am beginning to cry a little writing this. Sometimes I feel like sleepwalking. Sometimes I think I'll hear her voice and I'll look up and she'll still be there. But she never is. She was gentle, beautiful, sweet, unassuming, generous, strong, and selfless. She was everything I have tried (and failed) to be. She loved life more than anyone I ever met. When I was psychotic for four months she took care of me without an ounce of selfishness. She loved people more than anything, more than anyone. I didn't get a chance to say good-bye.

Perceiving value in your life is not a thought form of perception (awareness) at all. Rather, it is an emotional awareness. In other words, our emotions do not have some sort of mind control effect on us where they force us to perceive, through our thinking, our lives being good or bad to us. It is purely the emotions themselves that allow us to see values in our lives. Emotions are actually a sense like sight. They allow us to see the values that things and situations hold in our lives. It is only our positive emotions that allow us to see the positive qualities of life (i.e. the good values) while it is only our negative emotions that allow us to see the negative qualities of life (i.e. the bad values). Having neither positive nor negative emotions would be no different than a blind person. No value judgment can allow this blind person to see just as how no value judgment or mindset can allow us to see the values in our lives.

My partner died 3 months ago of a heroin overdose. It was extremely traumatic, as you can imagine. He is not my first partner to pass away in this manner. He and I unfortunately only got to be together for 3 months and it was unlike any relationship I had ever had. I let my guards down and allowed myself to be loved and I truly loved him. Our relationship was amazing until he relapsed. It was recognized to me by many people after he died that our relationship was very unique and that not many people get to have something like that ever. He was my soul mate. I was with a man for 5 years and never felt that kind of connection. His death has left a void. I acted recklessly, hooked up with people, reached out to people who didn't respect or care about me, and of course never felt connected (obviously unhealthy behavior). I was also sexually assualted by someone I really trusted just a month after his death and am in the process of court cases. But I met this guy and it was weird. He's perfect and has been wonderful and understanding in the short time we've been involved, but it hasn't been very long since my partner's death. I've questioned all of my motivations as well as his and feel insecure, but ultimately we have genuine well-intentioned feelings for each other. I worry I need more time alone, but he makes me feel happy in the capacity that another person is able and we have a wonderful thing going. Now I feel extremely guilty. Every time I realize I'm happy, I just stop and feel overwhelming guilt. I also have developed incredibly low self esteem since my partner died. It is so hard for me to accept that this man is genuine and cares and desires me and isn't just going to abandon me as soon as open up and I trust him. I feel conflicted. I want this. I do. And he knows what's going on and has been completely accepting of me. He even is willing to go slow and give me space to grieve. But I feel like I'm abandoning my dead partner even though in reality he abandoned me. Feedback, love, and support would be great.

Hello, This is my first post on this board. I was diagnosed and treated for bipolar 1 from 2002-2015. Last year I went off medication, and have been med free since Oct 2015. I went off because I believed the medication was hurting me more than helping and making me sicker. I felt I had nothing to lose. As a result, I regained mental clarity but had one long mania cycle and I am now in a very depressed cycle which is difficult to.endure. I am very depressed from stress but mostly from the fact that I now see clearly how my bipolar has wrecked havoc in my life. I am seeing it clearly for the first time and I am accepting it. I am 52, divorced with 3 kids. My oldest doesn't talk to me at all, my middle has some communication, getting better and now my daughter 13 doesnt speak to me. The alienation creates severe feelings of pain for me. I have hurt them and their mother and this is my reality. Their mother has played my mental illness against me in the divorce and has sought to alienate me from my children. She has provoked confrontations with me, has had me arreated and has played the victim to the hilt. I now have several court motions to addressential with her on house and alimony and alienation issues. There is nothing more painful than not having a relationship with your kids. Because of the massive losses, caused mostly by mania, I am now willing to accept treatment for my bipolar again. I am very afraid of medications that sedate me, make me lose my memory and effect my body weight. I do not trust psychiatrists, pharma, or medication. But I need help. I am a lost soul right now trying to find my tribe and get direction. My parents are supportive and a few friends but I have lost nearly all my relationships to my craziness and disorder. I had substance abuse problems as well but have been sober now for almost a year. I hope to hear from some of you that there is hope, that one can get through massive depression and pain as well as mania and find meaning and purpose in life. I really need to connect with people that are managing this illness well and might understand. I am powerless over my bipolar and my life is unmanageable. Thank you. Eddie

Hello. I was evicted on Monday morning, meaning on Sunday night, I had to get as much stuff as my friend could get into her car and leave home. I had to leave 90+% of my belongings behind including 99% of my books. It took me 15 years to collect those books. They were all hard cover because I had always planned on having a library in my home to put them in someday. Ever since I had to leave them behind, I have experienced profound sadness and grief when I think about them. I miss them so much and want them back. I am angry that they are lost forever. I recently lost my dad. He died 3 months ago, January 25th. It was very sudden. Some of what I feel now is what I felt when dad died. I know they are inanimate objects to most people, but they were much more than that to me. I literally had over 100 books. I have high functioning autism and can become overly attached to "things". Is the feeling I'm feeling normal in any aspect? Do those of you without an ASD relate at all? Just writing this down and knowing I will never have or see my books again has me on the verge of tears.

Depression (including anhedonia which is an absence of pleasure) are, in a way, sort of like the flu. It comes and goes. You first get sick. But over time, the mind and body heal themselves and you are back to being completely well. This is because it is vital to get back to the state of your full normal well-being. Otherwise, your chances of survival (thriving in life) are slim. So it is vital that your mind and body restore its survival mechanisms. This would even include pleasure since pleasure is something vital for our thriving and survival in life. Far more people feel depressed having an absence of pleasure than there are people who are fine with and accept an absence of pleasure. This would be because pleasure is so vital to our survival as I've said before. Depression, in addition to being perhaps a chemical imbalance, can also be a natural stressful response. Depression can sometimes be a response that warns us that something is wrong in our lives that we need to change. This holds true in my case since my depression is not a chemical imbalance or anything of the sort at all. Rather, it is a response to my anhedonia (absence of pleasure). This depression response (feeling of hopelessness) is warning me that I must have my life of full pleasure that I solely value so much in order for me to live a good worthwhile life. Therefore, since pleasure is so very important for me and my life and is very important for many other people, then this is why the mind restores itself back to normal and that your full normal amount of pleasure should soon be fully restored back to you. You should be able to soon fully recover from depression and/or anhedonia and live the life of full pleasure that makes a vital part of your one and only life good and worth living. However, my anhedonia has been going on for 7 months, there are never any brief moments of pleasure, and it still hasn't gotten any better. As a matter of fact, it has only gotten worse over time and I am now left with complete chronic anhedonia. Therefore, I think I might have some condition that is preventing me from recovering. Usually, when you get the flu, you soon recover over time. But you then have some people who have the flu for prolonged periods due to some other type of condition/abnormality perpetuating the flu. Therefore, this might be what is going on with me here. Therefore, once I take care of this condition that is preventing me from recovering from this anhedonia, then I should have my full pleasure back to me in life.

For starters, I'm in my mid-twenties, and my general issues are with anxiety and OCD, but right now, I'm struggling with something else. I am feeling majorly depressed. And I need help. I am very close with my grandparents. We live in the same city and I try to see them as often as I can. Over the last couple of weeks, my Grandma, who is generally fairly healthy, started feeling very tired and weak all the time. She has only been getting out of bed for a couple of hours out of the day. This week, we found out that she is in stage 4 cancer, and it is apparently too late for treatment. I don't know how much time she has left. My entire family is shocked and devastated, to put it lightly. My family hasn't made the decision to fully tell her what's happening to her, yet. She has been saying that she will be fine in a couple of days and was talking about places she wants to visit in the summer. Knowing this is so heartbreaking. The reason I am reaching out here, is because I am handling this so hard, I can barely think about anything else. I keep going back and forth from crying my eyes out to being numb. I feel like she has so much left in her, I don't believe it's her time yet. It hurts me deeply that I can't do anything to fix this. My Grandpa has been suffering from a chronic illness for many years, and the thought of him losing her and what would happen to him is terrifying for me. She is still here, but I feel like I am already grieving. I want to enjoy whatever last moments I have with her, and I'm struggling to see any light at the end of the tunnel. I can't imagine moving on with life without her. The good memories that are supposed to make you happy are only making me sad right now. I don't know how I'm going to get through this. I want to put it out there that I know this isn't chronic depression, but I have been depressed in the past, and this has brought it all back to the surface. I feel so helpless and I wish there was something that could ease the pain... Thanks for reading.

My happiness is the only reason for me finding good meaning about me as a person and finding good meaning in this life. Without that, there would be nothing good about me as a person or anything good in my life. I can just use my thoughts alone to perceive me and my life being good even without my pleasure. But these are nothing more than neutral (neither good or bad) thoughts and that would not make me or my life anything good at all regardless of how much I help others and do great things in my life. Therefore, since I no longer have any pleasure 24/7 due to my anhedonia (emotional numbness) in which there are never any brief moments of pleasure to any degree whatsoever, this is why there is no longer anything good about me as a person or my life. My dream in life was to be a composer and I was in the process of learning how to compose. My dream was to be a great composer through my pure pleasure alone because, to me, that is the only thing that defines someone as being great. As a matter of fact, the fact that I had the ability to experience feelings of pleasure so great and profound, this would enable me to be a really great composer who would be able to channel those feelings in creating emotionally powerful compositions. Feelings of depression and anhedonia are not classified as feelings at all. They are the taking away of your pleasure and other emotions. Therefore, they are not anything to tap into and channel in creating any type of emotionally powerful composition. Instead, they make you a lesser person and a lesser composer who can only create compositions through intelligence alone which would be nowhere near great and emotionally powerful as opposed to if you were to create compositions through your profound feelings of pleasure. In other words, even the greatest composers in history who had depression and/or lack of pleasure could of been even better if they had their full pleasure to tap and channel into. But I have given up being a composer right now since my only goal in becoming a composer was to tap into and channel my feelings of pleasure I valued so much and create many different types of music through my pure pleasure alone. Creating music through my suffering is NOT what I want to do and doing so would only make me feel that much worse. To me, music is all about enjoyment and creating music through your pure pleasure alone. I have given up being a composer because me choosing to become a composer brings me nothing but anger and frustration now since I no longer have any pleasure to tap into and channel. I refuse to be the biological robot in a world that absolutely calls for our experience of love and pleasure (which would be the emotional world of composing) who does nothing but creates music through having no pleasure. I will not channel even my own feelings of anger and frustration in creating music because, again, that only makes me feel worse and is not what I wanted to do at all anyway. Now, if, let's pretend, that I were the greatest composer in the world right now and composed masterpieces, this would actually be the worst moment of my life. This is because these would be the greatest pieces of music I have written and this would be the greatest moment of my life and I am not even allowed to enjoy it to any degree at all. Sure, composing music for other people and bringing them pleasure is good. But music is a very personal emotional thing to me and I must, therefore, experience good feelings from my music. Otherwise, me being a composer is completely pointless and detrimental as it only brings me nothing but rage and frustration knowing that I cannot experience any pleasure from my own compositions whatsoever as well as that I don't have any good feelings to even tap into and channel in creating my compositions which would be much more emotionally powerful since they were created through my emotions (my pleasure) rather than them being created without such feelings. Since my personal experience of pleasure was so profound and meaningful to me in the past, then I absolutely cannot just simply ignore this and choose to view other things in life as something greater. This is because I reject doing so and reject being the lesser person with a lesser life as a result. Now if you or anyone else here has found other things in life of greater value than your pleasure (which would include finding greater things in life than even your own feelings of love), then you obviously have not experienced these feelings nearly as profound or meaningful as I have to know that they are truly the only good and greatest things in life. Now if you can never fully recover your lost love and pleasure, then at least you have spent your entire life by being the superior human being who has tried to fully recover these things. If you are going to say something such as that living your life trying to fully recover these lost feelings instead of accepting this loss and moving on is a wasted life, it's not a wasted life. Like I said before, feelings of love and pleasure are the only greatest aspects of me as a human being and are the only things that make my own personal life worth living. So for me to abandon them and instead live my life for other reasons besides trying to fully recover them, THAT would be the wasted life for me. Finally, one might say that I am still a good person since I still care and help others anyway. However, to me, someone who helps and cares for others is no better or worse than someone who is a psychopath and kills others. The only thing that makes you a better or lesser person is your amount of pleasure in life regardless of who you are as a person. Since I have lesser pleasure, that makes me a lesser person than even Hitler himself who has more pleasure in life (although there may be moments where he definitely had bad moments in his life from harming others). The reason why I say this is because, again, my personal experience of pleasure says this since it was so profound and meaningful to me and there is nothing in life that can ever take place of that regardless of how much I try and change my attitude and other things. I refuse to even try anyway since that would make me the lesser human being with a lesser life as I stated earlier in my writing.

hi, im a 12 year old boy from Ireland and I don't know why I think about it but I keep thinking about my mam or dad dying and I just randomly cry and I try to not show it to them. In my dreams I have dreams and I wake up so scared and I always have to go check.. does anyone know what I can do! im so scared

You sit in the shadow of sorrow seeking, searching for the magic that will make the pain go away Weep what you must weep, not only for this loss,but for all other losses you have sustained in this life Surrender into the memory of what once was, and can no longer be This winter of your life will pass, as all seasons do Stay in your season of winterness as long as need be, for everything you feel is appropriate There is no right way to grieve - there is just Your way It will take as long as it takes It is important to be ever so gentle, kind, loving and giving to yourself right now and to let others be ever so gentle, kind, loving and giving to you Remember how deserving you are of gentleness, kindness, lovingness and givingness No one ever said it was easy to let go, let be, let life do what it is supposed to do Perhaps you feel you are the only one in the universe But out of your loss is an interconnectedness with all humanity - for you are One with everyone who has ever mourned When you live fully, your vulnerability takes you through the shadows of Winter where you feel you may never see the sun again To cease living fully because you fear the Winter shadow is never to see the sun at all Judge not the appearance of this loss Behind the darkest cloud of the dreary Winter chill is a Springtime begging to burst forth Bless this pain for it will bear its perfect gift to you in perfect time Out of your yearning for comfort, calm, growth and belief, out of an aching void, comes a divine mystical force It longs to thaw the frozen Winter of your grief For the invisible world of Spirit will be your greatest power with which to heal Know beyond all knowing that through the power of the spirit within you will befriend your highest Self The exquisiteness of this Friendship leads you to realms of compassion, humility and service - to a fulfillment you never knew existed Into a holy instant of Springtime - of harmony, creavity and the opportunity to once again master your life. Behold you will sit in the radiant sun without sorrow no longer seeking, searching for the magic that will make the pain go away - ready to love, to smile, to sing, to give, to heal again And you will have stopped asking why.

Is it selfish of me to self-grieve? I found out a few years ago I suffered a congenital lung disorder (restrictive lung disease/RLD, where your lungs are restricted from the outside from expanding to proper capacity whilst breathing). RLD eventually causes excessive pressure in the arteries leading to the lungs, as your body is starving for oxygen due to insufficient lung volume. The excessive pressure is known as pulmonary hypertension and is dramatically life-shortening. My doctors, at the time, said 20-30 years more and that was it. I was sort of glad to hear that, since 20-30 more years isn't bad, and at least I know to hurry up with my life. Over subsequent visits with doctors, though, worse and worse kept unraveling. We found last year that the RLD was caused in part by a chest wall deformity that should have been fixed when I was a child. When I was a child, none of my docs noticed this. This is not something you want to hear (i.e., "you could have been saved from death but your care team was too incompetent"). Particularly insulting since I always observed to my doctors that my armspan was much longer than my height, and that this could mean something wrong (turns out it does!). My lung vital capacities are around 30% that of normal (where 100% = normal). Statistically, 99.9% of people have a higher lung capacity than I do, at least compared to their oxygen needs. I'm in the "hazard zone" according to my current docs. One more bout of pneumonia is likely to be the end of me. I am getting thorough lung scanning (V/Q and all that jazz) done next month, although I don't know if I want to know the results. Maybe I'll just ration with myself that these doctors were as incompetent as the ones who failed to diagnose my thoracic restriction (though that's probably not the case). Then again, it's always wise to have prior knowledge that you're about to drop dead (most people, IIRC, don't have that privilege!). No, I didn't choose to be born with this crap, and I know that a lot of people have it far worse than I do. But these are things you don't want to learn in the middle of doing your PhD!!! It would be nice to hear from others who have suffered grave physical or neurological disorders. My lung disease I think has given me PTSD. Then again, being told your life is going to be rather short will give most people PTSD!!

How on earth does one on the spectrum manage the feelings of sadness/stress/fear for an ill loved one while another healthy grief stricken family member demands help and attention? My grama is very ill, and my mom is reasonably quite upset, but unreasonably sending me very very frightening and alarmist messages to drop my entire day and plans and life because she's practically dead- oh, wait, we're going for lunch. Or- oh, wait, she just really needs fluids but she'll probably be okay. I've talked with her about it, but I doubt she really gets it at all or why it isn't okay to do that. Any stories/theories/impressions about asd and dealing with grief? A time full of stress compounded by an increased social pressure?

Hi there! I'm working on my first essay for this term (yay), and I thought I'd ask your opinion on this topic. I have my research, notes, and my own ideas. But, I really value the ideas and opinions of others. So... My essay is to discuss this statement: For many people, death is a taboo subject in spite of the fact that it is of universal concern. I have to discuss a few points, but I would really like your honest opinion on Why is death treated as taboo? How might treating death as taboo affect the dying person and the grieving person? Fire away!

this post is about supporting my daughter rather than myself, so i hope it's still appropriate to ask questions. my daughter is 21 and has had three significant relationships with boys in her life thus far (i say boys because to me they aren't quite men yet). boy #2 hung himself just over a year ago. she was devastated. she still looks at his pictures, and has his name tatoooed on her forearm so that she'll never forget him. boy #1 hung himself a few weeks ago. he was the single most important person in her life, even though they've been broken up for about two years. they still hung out a lot, and talked on the phone a lot. she thought he was feeling better. as you can imagine, she is reeling from this experience. the funeral was heartbreaking - it was on what should have been his 21st birthday. he and my daugher had matching stuffed sheep, and he was cremated with both of them. i could barely hold my own self together that day - i cannot imagine what she must have been feeling. i want to know what i can do for her. it's one thing to lose your loved ones who are sick or aging, and another thing to lose someone to suicide (i think.... i cannot say this with certainty). i've found groups for people in her shoes, but they're all at night and that's when she works (and cannot take the time off). she has lots of friends who can comfort her, and for that i'm really glad. but i'm not sure, as a mother, what i might do that will help - and what i might do that would make things worse. if you've been through this before, and can talk about it, could you tell me some things that helped or didn't help at all? in a smaller way, i guess i want this information for my own benefit too. i didn't love him, but he was a big part of my life for a long time too. i find myself crying for him, and imagining how he looked when he died. i have a hard time talking about it without crying, and i know my daughter does not need to see that. i also keep thinking about my own life and how many times i've come so close to doing what these boys did. but i don't know how to resolve my feelings to that i won't cry, or bring my own issues into the conversation. she's functioning fine one day and then the next day she's a mess. do i give her space? do i hover? how do i remain calm about it? thanks if anyone can help.