Rachel Reiland Quotes

If the walls were cracking, I'd plastered the surface back to smoothness. If the floor tiles were crumbling, I'd replaced them. If the roof was leaking, I'd patched the leaks. I'd pretended that, because the "house" still appeared okay, all was okay. Nothing had changed; all had been fixed. Nothing else needed to change.

Deeply vulnerable and hurting within as you act tough outside. You do need people; you need them so much so that it scares you to death. You drive them away so they don't get too close; yet you regret it every time you do.

The only way to see the light at the end of the tunnel was to crawl through the mud in darkness.

Tempting as it may be to draw one conclusion or another from my story and universalize it to apply to another's experience, it is not my intention for my book to be seen as some sort of cookie-cutter approach and explanation of mental illness, It is not ab advocacy of any particular form of therapy over another. Nor is it meant to take sides in the legitimate and necessary debate within the mental health profession if which treatments are most effective for this or any other mental illness.
What it is, I hope, is a way for readers to get a true feel for what it's like to be in the grips of mental illness and what it's like to strive for recovery.

I was the one who was fighting for survival and I was also the murderer within.

One of the reasons teenagers rebel is to test the limits to make sure they are still there. But for you it was particularly difficult. And something you never really got over.

And, as an adult, you have the freedom and the access to indulge in much greater forms of self-destruction than a two-year-old could ever have. You can drink and use drugs. You can smoke. You can be promiscuous. You can kill yourself if you want to, run into the streets at night, choose to eat everything in sight, or starve yourself. It's dangerous when the raw black-and-white emotions of a child are harbored in an adult's mind and body.

I was getting better at controlling my emotional reactions. When feelings overwhelmed me, I learned to thwart the burning temptation to act self-destructively and to sit with the feelings instead.

If my mind began to wander again, I found a way to distract it. Stay busy. Get drunk. Get laid. Anything to escape the chamber of torture that was my mind.

Most important, the reason I wrote this book is to serve as proof that miracles do happen, that love can and does heal wounds, that there is hope for those with the courage and fortitude to seek healing.

Former pleasures meant nothing to me anymore. Life was a series of tasks to be endured, and even the simplest ones were painfully arduous. It took everything I could muster to cook a meal, wash the dishes, or do the laundry. My income was virtually nonexistent. My occupation was therapy.

If the borderline rage that had fueled me for so long was torn down and taken away, would there be anything left? Or would it take the life, the spirit, right out of me? I was daunted by the prospect of letting go without a clear idea of what would emerge in the old framework's place.