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Of course it's dangerous to assign your children the attribute of "having special powersl"; I think it's also dangerous to rush to label large numbers of children as having psychological disorders such as ADHD.
Amen again Babs
Kath, I am [i:aefd4cc647]really[/i:aefd4cc647] appreciating your comments. I'd like to share a bit more of my story if I may. Please note, some of the stuff more towards the end isn't directed toward you, anything you said, or to anyone in particular for that matter but are things I just really wanted to express on this topic.
I had severe depression kick in when I was about 13. At 23, being the self-policing (*whispering*) "indigo" that I am ;) I saw Patti Duke on tv and decided after much thought and many tears that that must be what I had. I marched into a doctor's office and "turned myself in". He was more than happy to give me medication and it did help. For awhile. I still had some occasional metdowns, along with some other pesky healthy problems.
Eventually, many years later, the physical stuff got worse, I started developing neurological problems, falling down stairs, running into doorframes even when I saw them coming....About that time I was having some dental work done and at that point the physical problems escalated in a big way. I was having several amalgam fillings replaced (they were old). I had to cancel the third set of removals because I was too sick -- ears reverberating, headaches -- just felt poisoned. After the last appointment I had run my car into a pole in the parking garage and tried to take a shoe off my foot that wasn't there.
So I started doing some research. I started wondering if I was mercury toxic. I went through dozens of doctors trying to find someone to test me. I was laughed at by one "professional" after another. So I had to become my own doctor. I was getting 2 hrs of sleep a day for those 2 years and was too sensitive to even the sound of human voices to have someone there with me to take care of me, I was totally exhausted and sick but I started educating myself about health and toxicity, both Western and Eastern medicine, and I finally found an MD with Eastern leanings who would give me a chelation challenge for mercury. My mercury burden measured an 8.3 on a scale of 1-9. (And what do you know...when you're toxic on one element/mineral, you are very often [i:aefd4cc647]very[/i:aefd4cc647] deficient in others -- including lithium.)
So...I wasn't bipolar, I was mercury toxic.
Orrrrrrrrr was I......?
At that point I was suffering so much that I committed to myself to 5 minute increments -- "Can I take this 5 more minutes?" -- and I did that for months on end to keep from killing myself. I was really struggling with the "Why me?" I was deeeeeply invested in victimhood. I was angry at God, the universe and everything because darnit, I was a good person, and I didn't "deserve this". There was a point one day when I surrendered. I actually said out loud, without thinking, "Ok, help me." It was at that moment that my ego "died" and I started to accept that maybe some of my choices had manifested this result. I realized I'd invested too much in the wrong people, people I loved who manipulated me in their own desire to fill in their own "holes", and that it had caused me so much stress my mind and body just couldn't take it anymore. When you are depleted in vital vit's/min's and aminos the body can no longer police the GI and toxins are allowed to settle in the tissues. One of the first alternative doctors I'd found after I got really sick hit it right on the head. The first thing he said to me after meeting me and sitting me down was "Who abused you?" My response? "I abused myself." It would be another few years before I truly understand what that meant, until that day I whispered my surrender on the couch.
And it wasn't until I opened myself up to that that my health started to improve. Not until then did I understand that if I was going to get better I had to find the answers within myself. I didn't do it voluntarily in the years previous, and now I [i:aefd4cc647]had[/i:aefd4cc647] to do it or I was going to die. I had to believe I had some wisdom within me and, happily, I realized that I did. Where before I looked to others for the answers I started creating ways of amplifying my inner voice. I would put my hands out in front of me, one was yes, one was no and I'd ask my question and wait until one got heavy. I started realizing that I really did know. I also figured out you don't get an answer unless you ask for it, because every time I stopped trying to find it outside myself and and surrendered and got quiet and just *asked*, w/in 48 hrs it would show up. I realized the answers were there all along, I just wasn't listening. My ego had it's own agenda.
A few months later I was well enough to pack up, even deep clean the apartment, and move back home. I got the supplements right, got off the meds and I was fine. After I eliminated the food allergies (we can eliminate them, and even do it ourselves, contrary to what Western medicine tells us) I was really in great shape. And now I know my body really well. I know what every symptom means, know how to compensate for the mercury when I eat foods that kick it out of my tissues or when I do too much physical work. I haven't had a day of the kind of depression I had before in 9 years now. I also realized that whenever I began to feel depressed I was inevitably plugging into beliefs or energies that didn't serve me, trying to justify to myself that engagement. I have my own business, I work out every day. Things are good.
So I went from Bipolar, to poisoned, to understanding that ultimately it was all a part of my underlying spiritual illness (dis-ease) ;) Now...I'm not saying that everyone who is diagnosed bipolar is toxic. (But I'd highly recommend that they check, and with a chelation challenge not a hair test and [i:aefd4cc647]not[/i:aefd4cc647] a blood test.) Nor am I saying that some kids aren't ADHD. But if we're going to be responsible about it, we need to do some digging. "Yes, ok, they are ______, but WHY." I had to work through half a dozen layers of "truth" before I figured out what was really at the root of my health problems. Before the mercury it was "Maybe it's Celiac", then "Oh, maybe the immune issues are a reaction to toxicity." Are our children not worth at least that much? When there is a hazardous piece of equiment on a playground we remove it, we don't leave it there and continue to administer first aid to all of the scrapes and broken bones. When we start applying that kind of logic to behavioral issues -- [i:aefd4cc647]then[/i:aefd4cc647] we'll be on our way.
I now see this as a spiritual journey, not an illness. I don't judge anyone else. But I know from my own experience, for myself, and from seeing casual nature of (and increase in terms of numbers) of diagnosis (plural) in the last few decades, that mental illness is big business. You are so right. Kids who truly have ADD/ADHD and not a nutritional deficiency or other spiritual or emotional issue should get help with that. But we are throwing drugs and labels at everyone these days -- this when the average western doctor only recieves 10 hours (!) of education about nutrition in medical school.
What's more outrageous -- to give these kids the benefit of the doubt, looking into the matter further, or putting the kabash on the whole thing, telling a kid there's something wrong with him because he doesn't fit the mold, telling him it's too damaging for him to think of himself as special, drugging him, and referring to him as a cult member instead? A kid who can describe events that occurred during his own gestation and birth to a stunned mother who never told him that he was [i:aefd4cc647]actually[/i:aefd4cc647] expected on Thanksgiving Day (actual day of birth: January 9th.) That kid was me.
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I suppose my point is that if someone thinks of themselves as an 'indigo', it's bound to stop them being able to put themselves in the shoes of an un-indigo. (which is most of the human race.)
I can only say that I feel more in touch with and able to put myself in the place of an "un-indigo" than most "un-indigos" I know. If that label is slapped on a kid who isn't, then yes, it's going to have some adverse affects, but the very nature of indigos is that they feel things so deeply and have such sensitivity for other people. The very person that most un-indigos would shrink from in fear, an indigo would fearlessly step up and engage. I was always the first kid in class to approach the person who was rejected by others, to try to communicate with hand letters with the deaf girl in Sunday School. When my teacher railed abusively on a boy in my class in the fourth grade, I actually got physically ill. I started crying and had to go home. I was the girl asked to the prom by the guy who'd had the trash can dumped over his head by the star athletes the day before. I was accepted by the "in-crowd" but I was also the person that everyone else judged as "losers" trusted. I've always had a very eclectic group of friends and I've remember thinking in college that if you put all the people I consider friends in a room together they would beat each other up. We feel the pain of others so deeply -- indigo or not -- that it hurts. We actually have to work to keep from, as the Native American's say "taking the feelings of others into our bones".
E.