I named this blog learning to thrive because I wanted to break out of images definitions of recovery that draw a clear line between well and ill. What I call the Disney ending way of talking about a stay on a Mental Health Ward. “You need to get better and get out of here so you can get on with your life.”

My life has changed hugely in three and a half years since the events at the end of sectioned. In many ways I am living the dream. I’ve not been back to hospital in the last two and a half years. I have an amazing care coordinator with whom I have built up trust. I am about to get married to my wonderful partner. We are living together and I am pregnant with our first child.

That’s the dream and I’m living it,but this is real life too. It includes the nightmares about being in hospital wake me in terror on many night. It has the struggles to avoid dissociating during sexual contact. It has flash backs in antenatal outpatients because the coffee tables are the same set as on the wards I was detained on. It has the balance that is making good decisions for the well being of my unborn son when so many times good and well meaning professional people have given me blinkered advice or lied to me and about me to get me to take the care they felt I should have and caused me harm in the process. I have had some wonderful help in dealing with all this. One tool that’s really helping though is applying the image of a labyrinth to my mental health journey.

I read ‘Labyrinth of Birth’ by Pam England knowing that as someone who would love to give birth at home with a minimum of medical interventions but who also has type one diabetes I am not going to be able to have my dream birth. I’ve been with a number of women whose own difficult experiences giving birth were triggered by being near the maternity hospital and wanted to work through this experience so that however it turns out I’m not haunted.

As I read I realised how well the image applies to my experience with mental health and how that changes the way I think about it.

During my time on the wards we talked about progress towards getting better or discharge. Staff might describe act of self harm as taking ten steps back. I might say the same about times when carefully negotiated care plans were overturned by the next shift who wanted it done their way. I often left these conversations feeling angry, guilty or hopeless. They often went off on tangents about whether I ‘really wanted to get better’ till it seemed easier to say I didn’t than try and put into words that things were not that straight forward.

With a labyrinth there is one path to the centre of the experience and out again. Unlike a maze there are no wrong turns and no dead ends. You never have to back up. You loop back and forward never quite in the same place and eventually you reach your goal.

However imagine someone is walking this labyrinth. They enter at the arrow aiming for the star and follow the path steadily. At point A they ask us for some feedback and we tell them excitedly that they are about half way there. As they move on we all understand that they are moving towards the goal.

But suppose they are walking this labyrinth but all we can see is the starting point, the goal and their position. Chances are that when we are asked how they’re doing we’ll use a line to model it. At point A they are doing so well and really close.

However when they follow the path onwards what do we see? To us they seem to be moving away from the goal, taking ten steps back or even self sabotaging. We wonder if they are even working to the same goal we are, which is always a good question if it’s us that set the goal but here they are but our model can’t see the world they are navigating to approach it.

For me it really helps to think of those times when things went backwards or were blocked as turns in a labyrinth. Rather than wasted time that all had to be done again I see it as long loops that are part of the way out. It’s helping a lot right now. I felt near the exit moving on from those hospital experiences, fewer nightmares and not running into flashbacks so much in day to day life. Then I got pregnant and suddenly had to deal with a whole new group of professionals offering support on both mental and physical health sides together with lots of hospital visits. Suddenly they are back on top of my normal fears as a first time Mum. I felt like I was going backwards and started fearing where it would stop and how I could look after our son when I couldn’t even keep the past in the past.

My care coordinator was great regularly reassuring me that she had no concerns and knew I would be a good Mum and reminding me that having memories trigger is not the same as staying stuck in the past and that a lot of what happened to me was really harmful despite people’s good intentions. When I thought about the experience as part of a labyrinth journey her words fitted. I may have been near the exit but I’ve turned the corner onto a loop that is further in. I’m still on my way out. I’m still moving forward but it isn’t a simple route.

What happens if you map your recovery experiences onto a labyrinth? What about those of people you support? I wish you a good journey.