(Whut? Latin - from a poem by Juvenal - means “healthy mind in a healthy body”...)
While I’ve been more than willing to subject you all
(“all” is such a big word for an average of 35 readers per post, back in this blog’s heyday) to various
intimate considerations of my physical health, and while the term
comes up as a tag in eight posts (nine including this one), I’ve been
more reticent about my mental health.
It seems that, in some ways, I’ve suffered in the past from a dichotomous position on mental health care,
similar to my approach to dieting: i.e. it’s a great thing for other people to invest time and effort in, but a mark of shame (specifically: failure) in my own self. {sigh}
Exploring why this might be seems to take us perilously quickly into stereotypical realms of family history. So let’s not. Let’s move onto the position I find myself in now, where I’ve come to view
psychotherapy as being pretty much identical to physiotherapy: part of you is
misaligned in a way that makes you uncomfortable and
takes up energy that you could be spending on much more productive activities;
discussing things with an expert in the field and following some of their advice to realign things, trusting your own judgement as well as theirs, seems pretty sensible.
Just as with physiotherapy,
finding a good psychotherapist whose approach suits you
(and, maybe more specifically, has the ability to take the you that you are now and help you on the way to transforming to the you you want/ need to be) is pretty
key. And finding ways to
keep going with their advice and guidance between sessions will give you a lot more benefit (and save you a bunch more money) than putting all your dependence on them to “fix” you. Ideally, they will help you
develop the tools you need to get to the place you want to be in.
We still, as a society, seem to have a
prevalent view that physical and mental health are separate things (denoted by separate names!). I’m pretty sure that this is, long-term, an unhelpful notion. It would be great if we could get onto speaking in terms of “health” and leave it at that, moving onto the specifics (knee pain, asthma, eczema, depression, dissomnia, vertigo, migraine, agoraphobia, broken arm, etc.) if necessary.
The thing is, it’s
all part of a system. Your
mental health affects your physical health, and your
physical health affects your mental health. Whether or not you subscribe to an idea of an incorporeal mind and a physical brain, the mind’s direction would still prompt the
brain to make changes in the body based on
electrical and chemical shifts. It’s an actual, physical thing that your mind does to your body. The same impulses that mean you can direct your hand to pick up a drink and tip, swallow, set down again, etc., can also make more insidious changes.
We still have
Stone Age bodies connecting with rapidly-adapting brains, technology, environments, and social structures. The responses that were
designed to get us out of life-threatening, physical danger quickly are being applied to much
less urgent, but much longer-term stressors. Stress chemicals hang around in our bodies much longer than they were ever designed to do, to the detriment of our immune systems, hearts, lungs, blood pressure, digestion, adrenal glands, skin, hair, eyesight... pretty much you name it, actually... In other words, our life-saving
response to stress is now killing us (those of us who live in a mechanised society/ have non-physical jobs).
So it’s
important to look after your mental health, because it’s you, isn’t it? And if you’re all over
looking after your physical health, you need to be
looking after your mental health, because it’s all the same thing. In order to get started on (and maintain!) a decent physical health regime, your
motivation and discipline need to be right - and this includes not overdoing it and harming yourself with it too.
Look, I’m
not one of those people who’s going to tell you that you can cure your own cancer by thinking right, and that colds are happening because you’re mentally lazy, but I am someone who’s read the
research that indicates that recovery from any illness or injury is massively affected by mental attitude (for interest: you’re
better off either being
in strenuous denial or full-on determination to beat it than apathetic acceptance that there’s nothing you can do), and that, since
cancer can be fought off by the immune system (we’re apparently all exposed to it multiple times during our lifetime - we only notice when we haven’t fought it off), and
stress affects the immune system, good mental health can only help when it comes to preventing/ fighting off cancer.
And, let’s face it, your
physical health affects your mental health -
long-term pain is a git for wearing you down;
illness makes you feel groggy and unlike your usual self;
revelling in the fitness and strength of your body can help your
sense of mental resilience, etc.
This is all
a round-about way of saying that, for the last couple of months,
I’ve been seeing a psychotherapist, and will continue to do so
until I’m in a position where I feel like I’ve
realigned what I’m capable of realigning for the moment. Unlike in previous goes over the years
(the first one was great, but the second one was far too insecure, and the third one was an old-school Freudian overly-concerned about whether I was breastfed...), the current
therapist appears to be a good fit for my world views, and visiting her appears to have
given me the stable base from which I can
ask difficult questions of myself in the meantime, and answer them too. There’s something
curiously empowering about the thought that, as regularly/ frequently as I need it, there’s a
safe space where I can go to express being as angry/ unhappy/ jubilant/ proud/ messed-up as I am
without fearing social punishment, and from there
move onto working out ways of realigning what’s causing me to be less than I could be, because
misaligned stuff needs to be brought into the light before you can start tinkering with it.
Go metaphors.
See, this blog is about
my quest to become closer to what I can be. (Remember
Maslow and self-actualisation?) And that
includes emotional and other mental function. I was
born with certain physical issues that make fitness harder (hypermobility, asthma, etc.), and
given others by the misguided actions of others (food allergies, generally crappy immune system), and
wrought some of them myself (the gimpy RTA-shoulder, for example) and these are things that can be
managed, overcome, worked around, etc., with some extra support and persistence, and with imagination and the right research and information. The
same goes for my mental/ emotional issues - presumably
some of it I was born with, some I
achieved, and others I had
thrust upon me. If they were
different, or
more profound, likely I’d
need medication, like I do for
other long-term conditions that no amount of exercise will change (asthma, for example), but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
My
emotional resilience is already improved, and my
assertiveness has increased. It’s like watching the way that
persisting in physical exercise has seen my
stamina, strength, and confidence improve, and for
approximately the same reasons. Also in common: the
mental/ emotional challenges outside of my comfort zone hurt like blazes the first time or two (see: dancing, cycling, weight machines), but that
pain fades into strength if I
keep going, especially if I give myself space either side of the early/ quantum-change challenges (and
recognise which pain is useful and which
potentially damaging... and then stop the latter).
This brand of psychotherapy isn’t forever, but it’s
right for where I want to get to now, and that’s the best I can ask for! :) I'm going to
continue to feel proud of the
work I've done already, and the
achievements yet to come - both physically and mentally.
