Packing Along Ways to Cope
In the near future I am taking my family on a cruise. It is a big trip that I’ve spent quite a lot of time planning and saving for. It is the sort of trip where people are supposed to leave behind all the trappings of regular life and go have adventures. We’re not going to do that. Adventures, yes. Leave everything behind, no. There isn’t a member of my family who doesn’t have some sort of mental health issue. Some of the management techniques for these issues involved coping strategies and controlling our environments. If you remove us from our regular environments and coping mechanisms, we melt down in fairly spectacular fashion. Howard and I discovered this last year when we went on a cruise. It turns out that both he and I function much better as human beings when we have an internet connection. When we wander through our usual internet rounds, we show our brain that everything is okay, predictable, normal. If internet makes the cruise enjoyable, then buying the internet package seems like a no brainer.
For the past week I’ve been watching my kids and evaluating which coping things we need to bring with us. I’m bringing DVDs of familiar shows, because several of us use shows as a form of emotional regulation. We’ll be bringing hand held video games for the same reason. I’m contemplating packing along one of our weighted blankets despite what that will do to the weight of our luggage. We’ve got travel speakers so that people can have their night time music. All of us will bring phones with an international texting plan so that we can find each other in anxious moments. Even with all of that, I expect there to be moments where one or another of us gets melty and just wants to be back at home. It is possible that someone will flip out and I’ll have to spend a portion of my trip actively helping that person make it through. But I don’t think so. I think that of the big family trips we could take, this cruise is going to fit into a relatively comfortable place for most of us. The travel days with multiple plane flights will be the hardest part.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to not have to do this level of planning for emotional management. I also wonder if we actually need this level of planning, or if it is all just a manifestation of my anxiety. Whatever it is, the planning is mostly done, which is good.