SUDS

by Laura and Allegra

No, it has nothing to do with washing; it's a way for people to assess their feelings on a scale of 0 to 10.  We're familiar with the concept but have never been big on it, since we've never seen any description of what each number means.

Someone in a forum mentioned SUDS to us recently and pointed us toward the link below, which actually has the descriptors to make the scale useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_units_of_distress_scale

Currently Charity is feeling a 10. Our system is at a stalemate. :-/

We took a survey of the four other bigs in our system (besides Charity).  All of them agree that Charity is the one who needs to take responsibility for her own healing, for the good of the system as well as for her own good.  It's hard for even the more optimistic ones in our system to remain  optimistic at this point.  But we're still hoping.

One of the other theories we've had is that the other four bigs will not heal/progress until Charity does. "As Charity goes, so goes the system."  But since nothing else seems to work in terms of Charity moving forward, we're going to try to see if the other bigs will take steps forward anyway.  They've been resistant, but now that they see how problematic Charity's resistance is for all of us, maybe they'll take their own steps.  Even small steps.  Something needs to change for the better.