Brenda Skidmore's Health Tips

Many years ago, I began to see through the prescription drug fallacy. This actually came about due to my living through one of the worst periods of my life. But, in thinking back on it, now, I did learn a lot from the whole experience, and it wasn't all that bad either. In fact, I'm grateful to this experience because it changed my life for the better.

I married extremely young, at age 19. My husband and I were both the same age, and not long into the union (about 3 1/2 years), he was diagnosed as having Bipolar 1 disorder. For 25 years of our married life he was on multiple prescriptions. These different drugs had very few positive effects on his mental health condition, and plenty of negative side effects on his emotions. This led him to drinking heavily, using street drugs, and denying that anything was seriously wrong with him.

Remembering back, he told me, that deep down inside, he did not believe that the prescription pills he was buying was ever going to make him well. I heard him tell me this many times. I remember thinking, surely he didn't really believe that. But, he must believe it, because he is no better today than he was when this condition came to live with him. We are no longer together anymore, as I believed there was something out there that could help him. I, eventually, let go of thinking that the solution was going to come from prescriptions. I tried getting him to think outside the box but, after all he had been through, he wasn't interested in trying alternative options either. So we finally split for good, 2 years ago.

Thinking even further back, as a small child, I remember seeing a lot of prescription pill bottles bunched up on a table next to a wall in my grandparents dinning room. I think most of us grew up watching our parents, and grandparents, thinking they needed to take pharmacy pills for various different health ailments from time-to-time. Grandma would always have me setting the table for the noon or evening meal. She would then come into the room and start taking pills out of all those bottles, and setting them on her and grandpa's plates. There were at least a half a dozen, or more, different colored pills on each of their plates. I recall asking her, one particular time, what are all of those different pills were for. Her answer was, "when you start to get old, a lot of things don't work right anymore. Your grandpa and I take these pills so things will work right again". I then promptly asked, "well, will you ever get fixed right so you don't have to take them anymore"? She told me, "you know, I really don't know the answer to that, besides you ask too many questions".

My grandparents were, probably, somewhere in their 50's at that time. Not too long from now, I will be in that season of my life too. I am currently 49, and proud to say that I am not taking a prescription drug for a systemic health condition. In a rare moment I might opt to take the smallest dose I possibly can of an over-the-counter pain reliever for some troubling and persistant ache. I seem to need less of these as time goes along, as I have started using strategies such as meditation and The Emotional Freedom Technique to pinpoint the cause of my pain. Unresolved, bottled-up emotions can have a powerful impact on many different issues in your life from physical pain and disease, to staying in dead-end relationships or having a bad game of golf. Our thoughts, absolutely, rule our emotions and our lives.

I can not say that I have always been prescription drug free. Throughout most of my adult life, on up to my mid 40's I have been on a wide variety of man made chemicals from birth control pills (for 18 years) to antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, allergy prescriptions, and acid reflux medications. I don't know why I thought I would have a different or better outcome than anyone else that I had known. I tried to believe in them but, just like my ex, I guess deep down inside I did not really believe they would really fix my problem for good either.

Out of desperation I, gradually, turned to cheaper and simpler options.

I have learned that your brain is a very powerful goal-seeking device. It determines that what you believe in will come true for you. It is also capable, at the same time, of giving an illusion to make you believe something is true. Subconsciously, whatever you intensely believe or feel will actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, let's say that you, intensely, believe that curing any type of health problem is going to be hard or really difficult for you to do. You will, then, find yourself in circumstances and events that will match your expectations with your way of thinking. To further complicate this scenario, feeling hopeless will make you almost blinded to being able to find a simpler or easier way to rid yourself of your current problem.

I know this may be hard for most people to truly understand. I'm not suggesting that you are consciously creating your health struggles because you enjoy it, or hate it. Most people do not like being sick or living in a diseased state. When it comes to this "thinking is believing" stuff, it goes on at a much deeper level inside of you than your intellectual, conscious mind, it comes from your fact oriented subconscious mind.

When it comes to your actual experiences, whether what is happening to you is something you really want, or NOT, both sides of the coin will have an equal effect in you getting to experiencing being RIGHT about what you, truly, believe!

As our thoughts bring on our emotions, we have a powerful, intellectual need to experience consistency in what we believe in, by what happens to us, or has happened to us in the past. We are consciously looking for evidence to back-up the internal stories we tell ourselves. They may be true or out right lies, you will need to question yourself thoroughly to determine what is really going on. Your ego does everything it can to try to protect you from harm. Knowing that you will try to, consciously, create the circumstances that confirms what you believe in, be very careful of what you wish to have. You will probably get it, just make sure it is as good for you as you thought it was going to be.

Along these guidelines, notice that you will attract and are attracted to other people who think a lot like you do. If romantic relationships have been difficult for you before now, we tend to judge our current romantic involvements with our past experiences with them. It is quite possible that you will attract another difficult romantic relationship to you. Changing some of your self-sabotaging behaviors, feelings, and thoughts, regarding romantic expectations, will have a different combination of potential partners being attracted to you. This may even turn a problem relationship around, completely, with your current partner becoming more trusting and less fearful of your motives.

Of course it could go the opposite direction too. Sometimes, when a stressful situation has brought two people together and something happens to alter one person's beliefs, the other person becomes suspicious and distrustful of the other. Maybe they don't see themselves as being needed as much anymore, doubting the other person's intentions, or afraid of this person's new found independence. They may have fell in love with that needy way the other person used to be. Their ego may be telling them, "what is this person trying to pull on me", or the ( mother of all lies )"well maybe doing it this way worked for you, but my situation is totally different, it probably won't work that way for me".

In which case, obviously, you are going to be better off to say good-bye to this opportunity. A better one is on the way, be patient.

Here's the connection, whether it's your health or romantic involvements you are wanting to improve, it all begins by doing something different. You can use your mind to hurt or help yourself. If you keep doing what you have always done, expecting a different outcome, that is what has been called the definition of insanity.

To get a different result, you are going to have to do something that is going to be very hard for you to do. It is not going to be easy, at least at first, to expand yourself outside of your current comfort zone. We all have one, for better or worse, because we naturally cling to what makes us feel safe and secure. Sometimes, as much as we say we want positive changes, we secretly fear them. Why? Because they are unfamiliar to us. When it came to some of the physical health problems I was experiencing ( well over 5 years ago now) I was really afraid of trying something else. Why? Because I was afraid they wouldn't work for me either. I am happy that I went for it anyway, because deep down I knew they had to be better for me than what I was doing. That turned out to match what I truly believed.

But, I was not satisfied with just this one area of my life. I had several other areas of my life that I wanted to improve too. The cosmos ( or God if you prefer ) was testing me to see what I had learned about going outside of my comfort level. Putting a stop to all of the UNTRUE stories is going to be a life-long challenge for me. Most people will agree, when you successfully climb one mountain there will always be another to climb.

For some people, depending on their circumstances, prescription drugs may be a viable, short-term option. I think deep down inside, most of us know that we were never meant to take them for a lifetime. Who's kidding who in this way of thinking?
Are you kidding yourself, or is it the companies who are trying to sell you on this idea? One thing is for sure, this controversy is heating up today, and is not going to be solved tomorrow. Just be aware that, right now, you still have choices. Choose wisely!