"Tool Kits for troubles and smiles"

Hi, I’m A Catherine Wheel and access my local adult mental health services via the Stonebridge Centre, City East Team, Nottingham .

My post is about: Tool Kits for troubles and smiles

A big thank you to our services (mainly the Recovery College and VoiceBox which is a group for voice hearers), for introducing me to the idea of a tool kit. Especially as no welding, digital or similar skills are involved. Service users, peer persons, and practitioners have all helped me put a box together with a lid on it that says: “Amazing Things Will Happen”. And inside I’ve got stuff so that amazing things do happen. Even on just another mental health day. This is the Tool Kit for troubles and smiles.

 I can now, to a point, get through good, bad, and indifferent days with my kit. I use it everyday/night, sometimes just to browse. I feel stillness; and a connection when I do this. Some stuff makes me laugh, cry, dance. Tool kits can be put together for any and all aspects of life. 

I’ve got cards inside this box with ideas, tips, strategies to get me through alternative thought patterns and loops, voices, and presences, scenarios, and images in my head that sometimes “inner” to me that I’m guilty, useless, rubbish, and other things. Some bewilder me. I’ve got cards with meaningful to me, quotes from books, songs, poems, etc, and things I’ve remembered someone has said to me that was very inspiring or kind. For example I’ve a card with this on it, but laid out differently :

“Never give up!” 

Then I’ve written who said this to me, where, and vaguely when, below the quote.

Quite a good find when I'm feeling hurt, broken, that I can’t go on, am passed coping, or on my own with it. I think of that person and the occasion on the card and I hold on to that.

I have specific cards with specific step by step things to do when I’m too anxious, too sad, too confused, too caught up in a thought, or things, or people, and can’t find a way through. I have cards with plans on them  for what to do in a crisis etc. There’s cards as well with how to contact our services/teams, and organisations that can help. So it’s a survival kit sometimes. For example, one step by step card has this on it but laid out differently:

A thought got your head?

Find pencil and notebook in this box

Write this thought out of your head

Take a break: short - coffee, water, long: the park - leaves against the sky

Read the thought

OK? Great. Do something lovely!

NOT OK? Write a list of all the not oks in your first writing.

Look at each one: can you do anything about this? Yes: OK. Be lovely. 

No: Leave it in the notebook.

Now break in. The DVD. CD. Vanilla Tell the stone its story or another story, stones like this.

OK? Great. Do something lovely!

NOT OK? Pick another card and do it. Now another. NOT OK? Next: find survival cards, crisis cards, Plan K, H, Y, and C cards, Yes? go , go, go No? Call it a duvet day

So it’s not all about cards. i’ve got a funny DVD, a CD of fave songs, a stone I painted, vanilla essence, books, poems, photos, letters, a medal, other uplifting, and memorable, special items. And I change the contents so my tool kit remains helpful and inspiring.

We all put my took kit together, from conversations with each other, bits from the Recovery College and VoiceBox, my research and reading, by chance, and some I just make up. What works stays, what doesn’t goes. Sometimes we help each other with our kits, and practitioners and service users have seen my tool kit and know how I use it. It’s a joint enterprise, but the tool kit is specific to each of us, and each of us makes it in ways we prefer. 

Everyone in my services makes this tool kit happen for me. Thanks to all of you. Please be proud you do this because it’s my treasure trove to prism me through. I hope “Amazing Things Will Happen” for all of you. Tool Kit, or no Tool Kit for troubles and smiles.

A Catherine Wheel, in the Certain Ages, with nothing to lose and everything to gain