Journey to an Enriching Life: From Mental Illness to Wholeness

By Maureen Bureson

In discussing the causes and her experience of mental illness, the author pulls no punches regarding her pain and the difficulties she experienced during her ten years of treatment and recovery.

In this book, she shares her experiences of five mental health hospitalizations. She describes the first as more like an emergency room where they stabilize you to free up a bed for someone else. The day after discharge, she was actively suicidal.

Her second mental health hospitalization was both more helpful and longer (eight weeks). She developed many more skills and learned the value of group therapy.

She was correctly diagnosed in her third mental health hospitalization and developed the specific skills she would need to recover from her particular diagnosis.

Maureen reveals her experience in three different intensive outpatient programs (IOP). The first met for three hours, three days a week. The second met for twelve hours a day for a week. The third was individualized for her with one of her therapists from the second IOP who had been trained in cutting-edge methods of healing preverbal trauma.

Despite all her work and the progress she made, Maureen required two more mental health hospitalizations before she finally identified the root cause of her illness and received God's healing.

This book, through sharing the difficult yet successful path from mental illness to healing, can be a resource for patients and families.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798886163919

Book preview

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Journey to an Enriching Life

From Mental Illness to Wholeness

Maureen Bureson

ISBN 979-8-88616-390-2 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88616-391-9 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Maureen Bureson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Other Mysterious Symptoms

Journal Entry

Journal Entry

Journal Entry

Journal Entry

A Diagnosis

Journey of Recovery

Journal Entry

Journal Entry

About the Author

Y our sister is hemorrhaging, septic, and has multiple organ failure. She will probably not survive surgery, but that's her only hope.

This was what the doctors told my younger brother, Tom, and his wife, Donna, after examining me when we arrived at the emergency department.

It was June 2008, and I was sixty years old. At the time, I was in the twelfth year of running my own business, doing work I loved, with the freedom to choose projects I found meaningful.

I'd chosen not to marry and have children, so my work was my whole life. For eight years since my father died, I'd also been caring for my mother.

Five days earlier I'd had a laparoscopic hysterectomy to remove some fibroid tumors. My bowel was perforated during the procedure, and I was bleeding internally. The gynecologist kept me in the surgical center a few extra days but then discharged me by phone despite my lab results progressively getting worse, and over Tom's objections.

I was left to go home and drown in my own waste.

I was too sick to feel anything. On the drive home, hoping to get a reaction, Tom tuned the radio station to a political commentator I hated. I had zero response.

This surgery was the beginning of an incredible journey in which I learned I had dissociative identity disorder (DID), which used to be called multiple personality disorder.

DID is the result of childhood trauma. Children can develop DID if they suffer a trauma so overwhelming their survival is threatened. The personality of someone with DID develops as fragmented parts rather than a cohesive whole. It can be caused by things like a difficult pregnancy and/or delivery, not bonding with one's mother, the death of a caregiver, or a serious or life-threatening illness. I experienced all of these.

Before she married, Mom's doctor told her she was too small