A way of evaluating life that is far too negative

🥗 SAFE SPACIOUSNESS: Healing by stimulating your positive emotion system to get that part of your brain active again

Here’s the infuriating paradox of mental health.

When you’re feeling anxious, depressed, lonely or hopeless, the last thing you’re looking for is some laundry list of personal improvement techniques to help you better your situation.

Each suggestion you hear only inflames your sense of frustration further.

Like when one of your family members tells you to try a meditation meetup, goat yoga or mindfulness class. It’s just another annoying reminder that your brain is a complicated, confusing and chaotic piece of machinery.

Thanks but no thanks.

Have you ever fallen into that paradox before? Where all the things you needed to do to get healthier were the very things your mental health problems made it impossible for you to do?

What a mind fuck. It’s like you’ve been given this disease that prevents the victim from seeking aid. Vomit.

Looking back, my longest battle with depression lasted for about six months. Which wasn’t that much time in the grand scheme of life, but it definitely felt like an eternity in the moment.

And the thing is, when it came to my mental health, resistance was intrinsic to my condition. My soothing systems felt impossible to access in the moment, especially when I needed them the most. Making my recovery an extraordinary challenge that took longer than I would have liked.

Barton’s seminal book about mental illness would have been a good read for me at that time. He writes that recovery is difficult, but not impossible. Making that very distinction between difficult and impossible is crucial, he says, since healing is a series of hard choices you make over a long period.

You have to recognize that difficulty might be discouraging, but failing to recognize it can be even more demoralizing.

And so, before we start signing up for classes and introducing new routines into our life, perhaps a lower lift solution would be rethinking the language we use when we we talk to ourselves.

That’s what depression is, right? A disturbance in the way that we talk to ourselves.
A way of evaluating life that is far too negative.

Simplistic as it may sound, it’s not a bad place to start.

Here, think about the last time you said something like this to yourself.

There’s no hope of things getting better. The world is bleak. My future is hopeless.

You have a right to feel that way. Your negative feelings about the facts of existence are valid. And you’re likely very good at finding evidence for those beliefs.

Just know, choosing to evaluate your life in that way isn’t helping the cause. You’re giving nothing much of a chance of feeling positive.

To truly heal, there needs to be greater spaciousness in your language. More room to focus on things besides the unwanted aspects of life.

You have to practice stimulating your positive emotion system and get that part of your brain active again. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How do you talk to yourself when you brain makes it difficult to sustain an active effort in treatment?