Banishing Negative Thinking

Image from http://disney.spiderpaws.com/eeyore_ii.htm

At the moment Eyeore is the Winney The Pooh character I relate to the most.  It's been a long and hard few months / years for us, what with Miss 6 Aspergers diagnosis and a lot of Unemployment for hubs.  On top of this I began to suffer badly from hormone induced depression and migraines.

Things are going 6000% better now. Hubs has an excellent job, if we are talking Pooh characters then he is Tigger, and he is now working in a place where he can Tigger to his hearts content.  Seriously, I never thought he'd find a job that he wasn't bored with in the first few weeks, but it seems he has.

Miss 6 is going SO well.  We've got help at school three days a week and it is making a huge difference to her. Reading is finally coming  along and she is much more content in herself.  This means that our extremely high stress household that was filled with screaming and tears at every turn, is starting to become calmer.  Screaming happens but its not constant, and situations now come under control very quickly.

I am also bribing her with money.

Yay money.

Depression and migraines were starting to take over my life for a week a month, and on top of this I usually copped another week to ten days persistent and illogical anxiety.  The solution to this has been to change pills, and MY LORDY has it given me my life back!! It has also given me a 5kg weight gain (and it all went on the space of 3weeks, seriously, it was terrifying to watch, I just ballooned!). But frankly I can lose the weight, I've done it before without much fuss, I'd rather 5kgs round my middle for a while than depression, migraines and anxiety.

So, I now find myself in a better happier place than I have been for a long time.

But, I'm having huge trouble letting go of the stress and the negativity. Its like its been so hard for so long that I've got stuck in that way of thinking.  I dwell on the bad stuff, expect negative things to happen and I feel like Eyeore, pottering around with a sad expression and my own personal rain cloud where ever I go.

Even worse, I've realised that Miss 8 is reflecting some of that negativity - in the way she views the world around her.

So, a few weeks ago I was wandering about the net (as you do) and came across this 30 Days of Gratitude post by the wonderful Nicole Cody of Cauldrons and Cupcakes.  It seemed so apt, so incredibly well timed that I got a shiver.  It seemed that Nicole was precisely what I needed...

Psychologists have found a link between gratitude and well-being. Studies have shown that when a person is depressed, anxious, negative and directionless, they can take control of these emotions and begin to turn them around themselves through a daily practice of finding things to be grateful for in their everyday life. The practice of gratitude literally has the capacity to rewire our brains, firing off more of our feel-good emotions and thinking patterns.  It helps us to remember who we are, what makes us happy, and where we want to go in life. - Nicole Cody (https://cauldronsandcupcakes.com)

Owing to being chest deep in edits I knew I didn't have time to embrace Nicole's course at that time. But now I have time, and so today I begun.

Of course at school drop off, where I attempting to exude the golden light of positivity, I had three different people ask me "What's wrong," in a concerned tone.  Sigh :)

Rome wasn't built in a day, hey!