Thanks to a poll on my Twitter back in November, my wonderful
followers decided that I should publish a blog post and film a vlog every day
for the entirety of December!
So welcome to December 3rd…
Today is all about my
collaboration with one very special brand on Etsy, in this post I’ll be
reviewing the products they sent to me and on December 23rd you can enter a competition to win these products and the
remaining nine that I’ll be reviewing every other day this month!The first of the Etsy products is this little mindfulness journal by the wonderful Happi Empire who are based in Perranporth, England.
When I first began learning Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital specializing in Personality Disorders, I absolutely hated the coping skill of mindfulness! I took it to mean that in DBT they recommend that you ‘stay in the moment’ and I wholeheartedly believed that I would be unsafe if I did so.
After the abuse in 2006 and 2007, I spent the following five years until I was admitted to the long-term hospital (for two and a half years) trying to pretend it hadn’t happened or do everything I could to block out the horrific memories. So, the last thing I wanted was to allow myself to ‘be in the moment’ where I worried that I’d end up so lost in the memories that I’d be unsafe. In all honesty, I thought that I’d end up wanting to be dead. So, I refused to engage in the Mindfulness exercises and hated completing the worksheets in group DBT sessions.