The research on trauma and mental health suggests that a huge part of the way we generally got into them was non-consensual treatment at the hands of other people and/or the world around us. So whatever we do to recover, heal, or otherwise address our issues, it has to be done differently: from a place of consent, care and friendliness for ourselves instead of a place of fear, shame, and harshness.

The master’s tools

Audre Lorde famously wrote that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. This means that we can’t dismantle systems and structures of oppression using the same kinds of mechanisms and tools that were used to put them there in the first place. If we try to do it that way we generally re/create corrupt systems rather than finding our way to some genuine alternative. 

We can see many mental health struggles as a set of inner systems and structures which were put in place when we were treated non-consensually during our lives, often in childhood, but also through traumatic experiences which happened later on. Most of the main therapeutic approaches agree that when we’re taught that we have to be a certain way in order to receive care and protection – or to avoid punishment or rejection – we develop survival strategies in order to cope.

Trauma and survival strategies

It’s these survival strategies – in the form of habits and patterns like addictions and compulsions, fear and anxiety, depression and distancing, anger and acting out – which we end up addressing as adults, when we realise that they’ve become a problem. They may be rooted, for example, in physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect at home, in particular traumatic events that happened to us, in the discrimination and hatred we experienced due to being part of any marginalised group, and/or in being repeatedly sent back into unsafe situations such as bullying or otherwise hostile school environments.

In our current culture few of us escape such experiences entirely. Few girls reach adulthood without experiences of sexual harassment and assualt and without learning the ways they will be denied agency and regarded as second class citizens throughout their lives. If you are part of an oppressed group you will soon come to realise how differently you are treated: how your body, labour and life are valued less. School is a pretty non-consensual situation for even those who escape the more obvious forms of trauma there, much of which is normalised. Most families pass on messages that children should override their self-consent in order to conform to normality, hide their feelings and/or meet others’ expectations. 

All of this occurs within a wider culture which rests on teaching people that they are lacking and should be different to how they are in order to ensure docile and productive citizens, and in order to sell everything from drugs to diets, fast food to fashion, soft drinks to spirituality.

Treating ourselves non-consensually in the name of recovery

The problem is that – once we become aware of our mental health struggles, our habitual patterns, or our unhelpful survival strategies – the way we go about trying to address them often mirrors the very way they were put there in the first place. We try to fix ourselves, we push ourselves too far too fast, and we force ourselves to do all the things we’ve been told will help, punishing ourselves we don’t find ourselves improving as quickly as we felt that we should.

This has been brought home to me recently in a few ways. I’ll share my own experiences here and then give a few further examples where this might apply.

Trauma work

First I’ve been struggling particularly in the last year or so with what I’ve learnt are called emotional flashbacks: quick plummets into fear and shame which result in feeling very small, fragile and incapable of anything. I realise I’ve experienced these at greater or lesser intensity throughout my life, but the literature on cPTSD has helped me put a label to them. After reading a few books on trauma I fixed onto an idea – also common to many schools of therapy – that it could be useful to use current triggering experiences to connect back to earlier memories of traumatic events, and to revisit those in some way to loosen their grip.

Being somebody whose survival strategy tends towards the overfunctioning end of the spectrum, I grasped this idea and ran with it. One day, for example, I decided to write down all the traumatic memories I could think of in order to start revisiting them as a regular practice. Needless to say the result of this was not in any way pretty. I’m learning that the only way to do this kind of work is slowly and gently. If you try to push through, or force it, you end up retraumatising yourself and doing nothing to loosen the grip of the habits you’ve developed in order to survive.

Mindfulness

Another example is mindfulness. As regular readers will be aware, I’ve always been skeptical of the mindfulness movement from a social justice perspective, and a lot of my work involves attempting to weave Buddhist thinking and practices together with social understanding and engagement. 

However, I definitely bought the Buddhist mindfulness idea that it was generally a good idea to put time aside every day to sit, to notice your thoughts, and to keep bringing yourself back to the present. I figured that should be helpful to enable me to become more present to everyday life, to learn how not to get carried away into reactivity when hard stuff happens, and to notice forms of oppression acting through me and working to dismantle those as much as is possible.

What I actually found was that my fifteen minute meditation at the start of every day ranged from – at best – sitting with my noisy mind carrying me away for fifteen minutes and feeling a bit bad that I hadn’t come back to the present at all by the end to – at worst – taking a fifteen minute journey into precisely how bad I felt about myself.

I’m now reading an awesome book by David A. Treleavan called Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness which brings mindfulness into dialogue with trauma-informed therapy and social justice. It’s helped me to make sense of these meditation experiences. As someone with regularly recurring cPTSD symptoms, meditation like this can be counterproductive unless engaged with in a trauma-informed way. In fact many – if not most – people experience some mild to major re-traumatising when they try to just sit with themselves without having any awareness of how trauma works. In pushing myself to meditate every day like this, with the idea that it must be good for me, I think I’ve been making things worse, and certainly not better.

Staying with feelings

A final example is staying with feelings: something that I’ve always been a big advocate of, as you can tell from my zine of this name. But engaging with the work of blogger and trauma-informed counsellor Love Uncommon showed me a vital missing piece of these practices. It’s only a good idea to stay with your feelings when they are in the manageable range. When they have reached a high intensity – or tipped into reactivity – then it is far more helpful to soothe yourself until they are manageable again. As with the other points, trying to stay with feelings when they are overwhelming is often retraumatising and unhelpful, making the feelings more scary and harder to stay with, rather than less so.

A similar thing is true for conflict and staying with each other’s feelings. A lot of people have the sense that the best thing to do in conflict is to stay and hash it out. But if any of the people involved has tipped into high intensity reactivity – or a trauma response – then that is a really bad idea. Far better to take time out, self-soothe, and cool down, perhaps making a time to return to whatever the conflict was about when everyone is in a good place to do so. Staying when one or more of you is in a place of trauma is again a recipe for retraumatising yourselves, acting out your survival strategies in ways that tighten rather than loosening them, and making further painful conflict between you more, rather than less, likely over time.

Other examples

Other examples where people often take a non-self-consensual approach to addressing their mental health struggles would include forcing yourself to go to a form of therapy or support that doesn’t feel right for you, staying with a therapist who doesn’t feel good, insisting to yourself that you must ‘be better’ by a certain point, anything which rests on the idea of ‘pulling your socks up’ or ‘getting over it’, and engaging in any form of self-help which is based on the idea that you are broken and need fixing rather than that you are okay as you are and deserve support. 

I’ve also had some interesting conversations with people recently who’re moving away from abstinence and restriction approaches to addressing addiction, self-harm and self-soothing to models where you allow yourself all the things you want, but engage with them consciously and intentionally with curiosity. One person said that any habit that harms us is oppression acting through us, so we cannot and must not respond with further self-harm and oppression.

It may seem paradoxical that some people experience way more radical shifts when they move towards the latter model, but it makes sense from the perspective that progress is only possible when we stop treating ourselves in the way that put the survival strategies or unhelpful habits there in the first place.

The role of fear and shame

Another part of this clicked for me after reading Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD (yes I am becoming a trauma nerd). He puts a lot of emphasis on the fear/shame feeling combo as being the key feature of emotional flashback and also – I realise now – a low level everyday backdrop to life for most of us with these kinds of past experiences.

Related to the idea that we can’t help ourselves using the same non-consensual approaches that hurt is in the first place, is the idea that fear and shame will not get us out of fear and shame. When we’re struggling we often try this kind of approach. We feel that we are bad people for struggling in these ways so we try to shame ourselves into addressing them or sorting ourselves out. We try to frighten ourselves into action by pointing out all the terrible things that might happen if we continue to employ our survival strategies.

There’s a whole additional post to be written about how fear and shame-based strategies don’t work for changing other people’s behaviour in a world where these seem to be the go-to strategies everywhere. Justin and I recently podcasted about this in relation to the fearmongering and shaming responses we’re seeing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fear and shame tend to make people frightened and defensive, and therefore more – rather than less – likely keep right on doing the things you don’t want them to do. The same is true with ourselves when we’re struggling. Like what could be a worse strategy for trying to cure ourselves from fear and shame than giving ourselves a load of fear and shame about our fear and shame. Think about it.

So what can we do?

So what I’m saying here is that if we treat ourselves in the ways that put our survival strategies, habits, or stuck patterns there in the first place this will solidify and tighten them, rather than dissolving or loosening them. 

What is the alternative? Well it is a massive challenge within our current cultural context because it involves us treating ourselves – and each other – in the radically different ways which intersectional feminists from Audre Lorde onwards have been encouraging us to do: valuing ourselves and others equally, practicing self-care, sitting with the places in which we are oppressed and victimised and the places where we oppress or hurt others. 

Such thinkers also point out that individual and systemic shifts need to happen alongside each other, given our interdependence. It’s hard – if not impossible – for individuals to change their inner landscape if the non-consensual outer landscape remains the same, and the idea that we should be able to do so harms us more. Engaging with others to share our experiences and work collectively is vital if possible.

For me a key starting point is self-consent. I’m trying to slow down my everyday life sufficiently to notice every time I’m drawn to override my self-consent. This is proving easier to notice now that many attempts to do so result in an emotional flashback plummet into fear/shame (trauma humour). But I’m also trying to notice the micro-moments of overriding my consent, the flickers of fear/shame that come up when I do that. I try to pay attention to what happened to elicit that response, to bring self-compassion to the situation to understand why that was my response, and to consider ways in which I might engage with whatever happened differently, in ways that don’t override my self-consent.

Slowness is another key here. This just can’t be done fast. Speeding up inevitably involves pushing through and getting overwhelmed. It’s helpful to tune into when I’m stepping out of my comfort zone into my stretch zone, and ensuring that I pull back into the comfort zone before I hit overwhelm. I was having a lot of quiet nights in before they became the default.

If fear and shame are a big part of the problem, then the solution is the opposite: cultivating protection and care to counter the fear and shame. Pete Walker talks about reparenting yourself and reparenting by committee. Other authors talk about cultivating a compassionate witness within yourself or befriending yourself, often alongside receiving a safe-enough and kind-enough therapeutic relationship to model what this might be like. 

I’ll be writing more about how I’ve gone about this from a plural perspective, but basically it’s anything you can do to be kind and protective towards yourself rather than shaming or frightening yourself, and to treat yourself consensually instead of non-consensually. 

Useful questions to ask yourself are: ‘what do I usually/habitually do under these circumstances?’ and ‘what would the opposite of that look like?’ You may find that there are several different ‘opposite’ options to play with. They may also be the ‘opposite’ of the experiences that resulted in your stuck patterns or survival strategies.

At this point you can bring those other practices back in. For me it’s not about stopping addressing traumatic memories, meditating, or trying to stay with my feelings. All those practices are immensely valuable, but only if done consensually, gently, gradually, and in ways that feel good rather than bad, and stretching rather than overwhelming.

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie.

The post The master’s tools and mental health: We can’t get out of our struggles the same way we got into them appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

What are some of the biggest barriers to people accessing good mental health care?

One major barrier is financial. While there is some good mental health care provided on the NHS, and by voluntary agencies, if you have less money or no money then it is much more difficult to ensure that you see a practitioner who is a good fit for you, and you may well be limited to a certain number of sessions. Wealthier people have a much greater range of private options available to them, and can shop around to find somebody they have a good relationship with: which is the most important factor predicting success in therapy.

After that I would say the stigma around mental health is still a massive barrier. People can be scared to acknowledge any struggles to themselves and others. For many groups it goes beyond an issue of stigma and shame, to being actually dangerous to admit to mental health difficulties, for example in terms of risk of losing work or having control over treatment taken out of their hands. Again it is generally the most marginalised groups in terms of class, race, disability, etc. for whom this is most risky.

What sort of practical support do men and young people with mental health issues need?

For men a major barrier are the cultural expectations around masculinity which can make it very hard to speak openly about emotions or admit to having problems. Until we have some major cultural shifts in how we understand gender, this means that it can be good to offer support tailored specifically to men, perhaps in ways that fit masculinity better than conventional therapy. For example, peer support which takes place in sport or pub settings can feel a better fit for some men.

In addition to being protected from poverty, discrimination, abuse, neglect, and violence (key causes of mental health problems), young people drastically need better personal and social education in schools to help them to learn about how to handle difficult feelings and develop relationship skills. These kinds of preventative measures would be far better than treating young people after they’ve developed mental health difficulties. However, of course, until the world has changed we definitely need good online and offline support for young people to go when they’re struggling.

Do you think it’s a positive that people in the public eye are speaking more about mental health issues? Why?

I think it can be very helpful indeed in decreasing the stigma around mental health, and letting people know that it is okay to struggle. However, unfortunately, people in the public eye often tend to tell very particular stories around their mental health issues: often stories where the issues are seen as purely biologically caused, and stories where they ‘got better’. It’s important to recognise that many mental health difficulties are caused by social problems, such as the ones I’ve already mentioned, and that many people do not have the resources that celebs have to get help and support.

What are the problems in the NHS at the moment re mental health care? What solutions are needed?

The main problems would be those facing the whole NHS at the moment of being hugely under-resourced and under-staffed. We need far greater investment in the NHS to enable it to support all those with mental and/or physical health needs, and we need to become a more welcoming country to immigrants, many of whom have just the expertise that we need.

Are you worried about the fate of the NHS with regards to mental health care? Why?

Very worried given the current lack of investment in the NHS. It’s just one more area where we see a widening gap between the rich (who can afford private therapy and other healthcare) and the poor (who can’t). Often those with less money will end up getting 6 sessions of CBT, maybe online rather than in person. This can be helpful, but it doesn’t work for everyone, and it can even be counter-productive for somebody whose distress has very real social causes to locate their suffering in individual ‘negative automatic thoughts’, for example. If we want to tackle mental health problems we need a more equal society.
End of story.

For more on the social side of mental health struggles, check out:

My zine on Social Mindfulness

My other blog posts on mental health include:

• Mental health beyond binaries
• Mental health: Beyond the 1 in 4
• Mental health: Beyond a health focus
• Mental health interview 1
• Supporting each other through mental health crises
• Mental health and relationships

The post Mental health interview appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

What is your understanding of the phrase ‘mental health/wellbeing’?

For me that would be the state where life doesn’t feel like a struggle, where we feel generally able to cope with things that happen, and to treat ourselves relatively kindly. Often ‘mental health’ is seen as in a binary with ‘mental illness’: either we are mentally healthy, or we are mentally ill, and those are seen as relatively fixed states. For me it’s more of a continuum that all of us go up and down over the course of our lives.

What possessed you too create your zine ‘Staying with our Feelings’ and what reactions and feedback did you receive from consumers? (Ps. I love the layout and sketches!)

I’m so glad you liked it! As with most of my work it was inspired by my own struggles, and what I’ve found works for me, and for the people I work with. I was struck that lots of different approaches to mental health include this same idea that it’s useful to stay with our feelings. However, a lot of folks I talk with don’t really know what that means. So I decided to make a simple zine to explain it, and to give some suggestions about some of the different ways of doing it.

The feedback has been really positive! A lot of people say the zine is a lot more accessible to young people, or neurodiverse people, for example, than a book or even a written website. The mix of images and words can make it both more engaging and easier to understand.

Which emotion from your experience and understanding do you feel is becoming most prevalent in modern day society and why?

I would have to go with self-criticism – is that an emotion?! – anyway the whole set of shame type feelings where you feel bad about yourself and like you’re a terrible person, or there’s something wrong with you, or you’re nowhere near as good or worthwhile as everyone else. It’s very linked to the feeling of depression, as well as anxiety that people might ‘find you out’. This is highly prevalent in modern society because consumer culture is based on making us feel bad about things so that we’ll buy products which we’re sold on the basis that they will make us happier, more attractive, more successful, or whatever. Also it’s pretty handy for those in power if we’re all so busy worrying about ourselves that we don’t get politically involved, or act against the cultural messages or structural inequalities that hurt us.

You stated in your Ladybeard article ‘ Depression and Anxiety is a sane response to an insane world’ do you believe these illnesses are a modern day construct and what do you see for the future of our generations in terms of emotion?

I think this is even more clear now than when I wrote that article! With everything that is going on post-Brexit and post-Trump, depression and anxiety could be seen as a pretty sane response. However I would always say that our experiences are ‘biopsychosocial‘. It’s not that social conditions alone ’cause’ mental illness, but rather they weave together in a complex way with our bodies and brains (our biology) and our unique life experiences (our psychology) to result in our own particular patterns when it comes to our mood and how we tend to react to things.

My hope for the future – whether it is realistic or not – is that a key emotional state will be kindness, or compassion, because that’s what we desperately need in order to counter our self-criticism, and the tendency to judge others, or treat them as disposable.

Why do you think emotion and our mental health is such a taboo subject?

We’re taught to feel a lot of shame about mental health difficulties. Also, we’re taught that some emotions and ‘positive’ and others are ‘negative’ and we should really only feel the ‘positive’ ones, otherwise we’re a failure at life. The Pixar movie Inside Out is one of the most profound things I’ve seen about how actually we need all of our emotions in order to have good mental health. Trying to only feel joy, and no sadness, anger or fear, for example, is paradoxically one of the main things that tips us into depression.

I want to understand how we can learn to communicate our feelings more and cope with our mental health better. Therefore, can we use our physical strength to help our mental health. Do you feel there is a correlation between the two, if so, how and why?

Oh absolutely the two are connected. In the West we’ve separated the body and mind for a long time now, but actually they can’t be separated at all. We’re embodied beings. So one of the most helpful things we can do to stay with our feelings is to learn to locate them in our bodily sensations. Similarly, doing things where we feel that great sense of being in our bodies often has a profound impact on our mood. People often feel that when they are moving, listening to music, or being in nature, for example. Again the cultural message that our bodies are something to be ‘perfected’ and ‘beautified’ in order to fit some conventional ideal of what is attractive goes completely against this embodied approach!

From my research I have been focusing on ‘The Emotional Economy’, which discusses how we are feeling more feelings than ever before and trying to find new ways to express ourselves. I feel there is a revolution taking place around normalising mental health outside the medical arena and in the creative space, would you agree?

I think to some extent yes there is much more information and understanding about mental health than there was when I – or my parents – were growing up, for example. But the problem is that we still tend to ‘individualise’ mental health problems – seeing them as something that some people have because of their faulty brains, or faulty thinking – rather than recognising just how tied they are to the wider culture, and to material conditions like poverty, homelessness, and experiencing discrimination, for example.

Furthermore, through what form of creativity (for example art, performance, film) would you say this is most prominent?

Oo hard to say. I’m a big fan of comics, and I think that the large number of mental health web-comics and graphic memoirs has been hugely helpful in capturing diverse experiences of mental health struggles, and normalising them. I worked with Caroline Walters and Joseph de Lappe to make 4 issues of Asylum magazine about this if you’re interested in finding out more.

My big idea is encouraging Generation Y, also known as the IPOD generation (Insecure, Pressurised Over-taxed and Debt-ridden) to go outdoors and do something creative as a means to help express their mental-self more positively. Do you agree and do you see this working?

Absolutely I think both those things are incredibly helpful when it comes mental health – although I’d be wary of advocating them for everyone because different things work for different people, and at different times in their lives.

The IPOD thing is interesting because if those are the key problems (and I think they probably are) then I’d be focused on what we can do to give this generation more security, less pressure, less tax, and less debt. Hence the answer would be political and social reform rather than anything else. So yes get outdoors (on a march) and do something creative (write to your MP, make a placard)

I think Audre Lorde’s famous quote also comes in here ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’ Even if we locate the causes of much of our suffering in wider society, it’s still vital to do forms of self-care in order that we have the energy to resist and protest. For me getting outdoors and being creative are certainly two essential forms of self-care.

If you could describe your mind as a biscuit, what would it be and why?

A Florentine coz it’s pretty nutty

If you could describe your mind as a colour palette, what would it look like and why?

Going back to Inside Out I would hope it’d look like a rainbow, indicating that I was okay with being in all of the different emotional states. It’s probably a lifelong process to get there though.

Find out more

My zine on social mindfulness covers these ideas in more detail.

My other blog posts on mental health include:

• Mental health beyond binaries
• Mental health: Beyond the 1 in 4
• Mental health: Beyond a health focus
• Mental health interview 2
• Supporting each other through mental health crises
• Mental health and relationships

The post Mental health interview appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I’ve experienced mental health struggles for most of my life. For me, like many of us, that means that I’ve had a high level of self-critical background noise a lot of the time: thoughts that I’ve done something terribly wrong, or that I will do, or that there’s something wrong with me. It often manifests as a low, heavy mood: a kind of grey fog over everything that makes it difficult to see things clearly, to make decisions, or to appreciate the beauty of the world around me. At its worst, it has tipped into extreme self-loathing and the urgent wish to eradicate the ‘bad’ parts of me in order to make myself acceptable.

Despite these experiences I’ve always been reluctant to label myself with the terms that might seem obvious when you read this description. I’ve probably ticked the boxes for several of the recognised ‘psychiatric disorders’ in my time, but I don’t feel comfortable identifying as a person with depression, as mentally ill, or as having a psychological problem. Equally I don’t feel comfortable identifying as sane, mentally well, or psychologically healthy. As with so much in life, I feel that the binary – in this case between ‘mad’ and ‘sane’ – is actually part of the problem.

The mad/sane binary

The mad/sane binary is present in all of the mainstream messages that we receive about mental health. For example, high profile campaigns to end mental health discrimination have often centred around one, apparently game-changing, statistic: 1 in 4 people have a mental health problem. Celebrities like Stephen Fry and Ruby Wax have used the figure to speak bravely and openly about their experience of mental ill health, but the danger of that statistic is that it suggests that 75% of the population do not experience any mental health problems at all. Rather than seeing mental health as a continuum which we might all move up and down over the course of our lives, we’re forced to stake our identity on one or other side of a strict dividing line:

‘Either … I have a mental health problem – I need help – it’s not my fault
Or … I don’t have a mental health problem – I don’t get help – it is my fault’

In this way we’re placed in a double bind, because accepting one side inevitably involves denying the other, and neither side promises a great outcome. If we’re seen as having a mental health problem we may well feel utterly disempowered, as if there’s nothing that we can do to improve our situation. If we’re seen as not having a mental health problem we might feel like we can’t admit to having any problems or get any support because we’re completely responsible for our own happiness and well being. The responsibility either rests entirely with other people, or entirely with ourselves, and either way that puts us in an untenable position.

Linked to this is the fact that both sides of the binary internalise suffering, seeing it as a purely individual thing, rather than a symptom of wider social issues. We are forced to view mental health problems as inborn, either caused by illness (perhaps a genetic vulnerability and/or brain chemistry issue) or by a personal deficiency (such as bad habits, faulty thinking, or lack of moral fibre). This can be very damaging because there’s strong evidence that all our human experiences are biopsychosocial: a complex interaction between the world around us, our personal experiences of it, and our bodies and brains, with all of those aspects influencing the others. We risk doing further damage to ourselves when we attempt to change our individual experience without recognising the role of social injustice or cultural messages in our suffering.

Social suffering

For example, it’s clear that structural oppression and social inequalities have a major role in mental health struggles because we see far higher rates of such difficulties in groups who are socially marginalised. One recent UK study found that women were 40% more likely to develop anxiety and depression than men, for example, another found that LGB people are twice as likely to be suicidal as straight people, and a further one that BAME people are six times more likely than white people to be admitted as in patients in mental health services. We need to recognise the role of intersecting marginalisations in mental health struggles, and the ways in which social experiences such as poverty, discrimination, and the experience of trauma are highly related to psychological distress.

We also live in a culture, which encourages the very kind of self-critical thinking that’s a feature of all the most common mental health problems. The French philosopher Michel Foucault famously used the analogy of the panopticon prison for our culture. In this prison there’s a single guard sitting at the top of a central tower in the middle who is able to see into all of the prison cells. Prisoners end up monitoring their own behaviour all of the time, just in case they might currently be being watched.

Foucault argued that our culture works in this way through all of the pressure we’re under to self-improve, and to present a positive, successful self to the world. We’re made to feel fear that we might be lacking or failing in some way, and we’re sold products which claim to help us to allay those fears. Makeover shows, self-help books, and beauty products are some of the more obvious examples. Social media also encourages us to maintain the illusion of perfection online, leading to endless rounds of self-evaluation and comparison.

In a world where so many of us are struggling with very real social problems, it’s vitally important to acknowledge the cultural context we’re in and to resist individualising our suffering. The mad/sane binary is very effective in preventing challenges to toxic policies and practices because people are not aware of the social context of their struggles, and because there is a fear that if you do speak out you will be dismissed as ‘insane’.

We can see this at play in the recent moves to regard unemployment as a psychological problem and the insistence that those claiming benefits undergo cognitive behavioural therapy. The responsibility is placed on the individual rather than on wider societal problems, and resources are focused on psychological change rather than addressing economic inequalities. There’s a high risk that people are left in the same damaging situation, but with an even greater tendency to blame themselves for it.

A sane response to a mad world?

The psychotherapist Winnicott famously said, of depression: “The capacity to become depressed […] is something that is not inborn nor is it an illness; it comes as an achievement of healthy emotional growth […] the fact is that life itself is difficult […] probably the greatest suffering in the human world is the suffering of normal or healthy or mature persons”. Perhaps we would do well to view the depression, anxiety, and other mental health struggles that most of us grapple with at some point as a sane response to an insane world. This would shift the emphasis for change away from the individual and towards the wider societal structures and cultural messages around us.

I know that what has helped me the most in this area has been to recognise the social and cultural aspects of my struggles. It’s a huge relief to allow the weight of total responsibility to lift, and to recognise the role of internalised self-criticism and social power dynamics in my experiences. This acknowledgement also allows me to engage critically with the mad/sane binary: resisting the sense that I’m completely responsible for my difficulties and the sense that I have no capacity at all to help myself. In this way I can cultivate a kinder relationship with myself, on the one hand, and feel more of a sense of kinship with all of the others who are in the same cultural boat. Such connections enable the possibility for collective resistance and for social activism, which feel like a much better focus for my energy than continually trying to change myself.

Find out more

My zine on social mindfulness covers these ideas in more detail. My zines on Staying With Feelings, Self-Care, and Plural Selves are also relevant to mental health.

My other blog posts on mental health include:

• Mental health: Beyond the 1 in 4
• Mental health: Beyond a health focus
• Mental health interview 1
• Mental health interview 2
• Supporting each other through mental health crises
• Mental health and relationships

For more on LGBT and GSRD mental health,  check out:

• New Resource on Gender, Sexual & Relationship Diversity (GSRD) and Mental Health
• LGBT+ mental health video
• Bisexual mental health

The post Mental health beyond binaries appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

When I saw that the main characters in Inside Out were a person’s emotions I knew that I absolutely had to go see it. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact several times I was moved to tears by how familiar the experiences were, and by this hugely important, complex, and rarely-expressed message being communicated so simply and profoundly in a ‘kid’s film’.

If you’d rather not be spoilered for the movie then please do go see it before reading the rest of this post. Also do be aware that it may well tap into lots of different emotions as you’re watching it – if you’re anything like me – not just the joyful ones. As we’ll go on to see that may not be a bad thing!

The rest of this post is divided into three sections:

• Experiencing all of our emotions
• Shutting down our emotions
• How to sit with our emotions: A practical guide

Experiencing all of our emotions

Inside Out follows an eleven-year-old, Riley, and her emotions – Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear – as her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. Previously her inner world has been dominated by Joy. Joy has made it her business to ensure that Riley remains as happy as possible, building up a store of mostly joyful memories which have, in turn, shaped her personality. However, following the house-move, many of these memories become tainted by Sadness – who can’t seem to stop herself from touching them and turning them blue.

In her attempts to prevent Sadness from causing any more damage, Joy manages to get both of them ejected from the control room to the outer reaches of Riley’s inner world. This leaves Anger, Fear and Disgust in charge while Joy and Sadness try everything they can to get back before Riley runs away from her new home.

The message of the movie is that we require all of our emotions: not just the so-called positive ones. We soon realise that Joy’s tendency to ignore and suppress Sadness is actually getting in the way of them finding their way home. It seems like things work pretty badly when just one of the emotions takes charge, and much better when they all work together through being equally valued.

One of the most poignant moments in the movie is when Riley’s old imaginary friend is devastated to realise he’s lost his last chance ever to be with Riley. Joy’s attempts to cheer him up or force him to keep going fail. However, when Sadness sits with him and shows that she understands how hard it is for him, he’s able to experience his own sadness, to cry, and eventually he’s ready to move again.

The theory that kept coming back to me as I watched the movie was Emmy Van Deurzen’s compass of emotions. In this, Van Deurzen imagines the emotions on a wheel which we travel round all of the time, moving from ‘high’ feelings like joy and pride, through anger and fear to low feelings like sadness, and then up the other side through envy and hope, to joy again.

Critically, Van Deurzen argues that we need to be able to experience all of the emotions to go around the compass like this. If there are emotions which we shut down or avoid then we’re likely to get stuck in certain places. Paradoxically, as in Inside Out, if we disallow one emotion – like sadness – we’re likely to become stuck and find that we stop experiencing joy much too. If we lose the capacity to experience some of the emotions entirely – as when Sadness and Joy are lost in the film – we risk falling into depression and all of our emotions becoming shut off. This is rightly depicted as the darkest moment in Inside Out.

It may not be that we always move in the same direction on the compass, or that certain emotions always follow others. Indeed, as Inside Out shows, we can often experience seemingly opposing emotions at the same time (e.g. joy and sadness, anger and hope, fear and determination). Indeed, when the first memory comes in that reflects these kinds of mixed feelings we see that it is perhaps even more beautiful and valuable than some of the ones which reflected only one of the basic emotions on its own.

Shutting down our emotions

The problem is that, through our lives, most of us learn that certain emotions are not acceptable: either to express or – often – even to experience.

This is what moved me to tears several times during the film as I remembered moments in my own childhood and adolescence when – like Riley – I learnt that certain feelings were unacceptable. It made it even more powerful that – for me like Riley – a critical time was the sudden experience of starting a new school with strange and different rules. However, of course, these moments are different things for different people, they happen at different points in life, and they can be gradual, or sudden, or both.

The film underlines what a terrible impact such messages can have as elements of Riley’s personality – that we’ve previously enjoyed watching – turn grey and gradually disintegrate entirely when her emotions are lost. Most devastating for me was the moment when Goofball Island disappeared. Now that it wasn’t safe for Riley to experience all of her feelings there was no way that she could goof about in the way she used to as a child.

Where does this shutting down come from? We can see it on multiple levels like those I wrote about in the recent zine that I posted about here.

On the outer level our wider culture gives us strong messages about which emotions it’s okay to feel and which it isn’t. Generally in western cultures we’re encouraged to have happiness and ‘positive’ emotions and not ‘negative’ ones. The British ‘stiff upper lip’ also discourages expressions of fear. And messages also differ depending on our individual identities, with certain emotions being seen as more or less acceptable for people of certain genders, classes, ages, or nationalities, for example.

On the next level in, our communities and institutions also reinforce many of these messages. In the movie we see how, in her new school, it isn’t acceptable either for Riley either to show too much enthusiasm for the things she’s passionate about, or to show sadness about what she’s lost. The cool girls will judge her for it. It’s easy to find ourselves joining in this kind of tone-policing in our communities – of whatever kind – whereby certain emotions are deemed unacceptable to admit to or express – for certain people or across the board. It’s worth being mindful of this whenever we find ourselves judging how somebody ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ feel about something.

At the interpersonal level we learn a great deal about acceptable and unacceptable feelings from our close relationships, particularly from the family and friends who are around us growing up. In Inside Out Riley’s parents inadvertently give her the strong sense that they appreciate her being happy and strong during the house move. She takes this as a message that it isn’t okay to be struggling in any way about it. Riley is even described as their ‘happy girl’: fixing her in this way. We then see how Riley’s – and Joy’s – attempts to keep her joyful tragically have the opposite effect. By trying to sustain her joyful persona in the face of great pain she actually becomes angry, anxious and cut-off, and risks losing the love of her parents as they don’t recognise her any more. In another key moment Riley’s old friend doesn’t seem to realise how envious Riley will be of her new friendship. When envy doesn’t feel acceptable, Riley goes straight to anger, and ends the friendship.

How to sit with our emotions: A practical guide

Fortunately for Riley, Sadness and Joy are able to make it back to the control room – once Joy recognises the value of Sadness. Then Riley is able to take the risk and show her parents how sad and frightened she is. Even more fortunately, perhaps, her parents are able to accept her emotions, to share some of their own, and to let her see that they love her as much when she’s sad as they do when she’s happy.

Most of us are not so lucky. Our parents – and the other close people in our lives – live in the same wider culture as we do with all of its crappy messages about unacceptable feelings. They’re also part of institutions and communities that have done a number on them. And they’re in their own family systems wherein certain emotions have been deemed too dangerous or threatening. So they may well have responded to moments like Riley’s by giving us a clear message that our fear, sadness, anger, joy, disgust, or other feelings, were not something that they could be around, or even that they couldn’t love us if we expressed them.

We will have internalised this. Either we’ll have managed to find a way of shutting down those emotions entirely, or – perhaps – in trying to shut them down we’ll have managed to make them shout even more loudly so we’ve become defined by them. Or a bit of both. There are so many ways that this can go.

The urgent question is what we can do now. Here we are, as adults, with all these imbalances, exaggerations, and silences in our emotional states. What can we do about it?

The answer that many different therapies, meditation practices, and belief systems have come up with is the idea of ‘sitting with’ our emotions. I’ll briefly describe one of these practices – a person-centred therapy technique called focusing – here, but there are several similar practices in other therapeutic and spiritual approaches if this one doesn’t work for you.

Focusing reveals perhaps the main flaw which I found in Inside Out which is the fact that the emotions are located in Riley’s brain and not in her body. It’s good that Inside Out doesn’t buy into the popular idea that emotions and rationality are separate things. Instead it expresses the existential view that we’re always in emotion: propelled towards things or away from things by our feeling states. However, the film does buy into another ‘dualistic’ split: that of separating the mind and the body, and seeing the mind as the most important bit. Actually, this kind of focus on the mind can be part of how we lose touch with our emotions: We stop being able to tune into our bodily sensations and the important things we can learn from these about our feelings, and instead try to figure things out, or fix things, on a purely intellectual level.

In focusing practice the attention is right on these bodily states. It’s most basic form goes like this:

• Sit comfortably and quietly and bring your attention slowly to your body and how it’s feeling.
• Ask what wants your attention. Focus in on any sensation that you notice in your body (a tightness of the throat, a clenched stomach, or a sense of emptiness, for example).
• Say ‘hello’ to that sensation: welcome it warmly, like Sadness sitting down with Riley’s imaginary friend.
• Really listen to the sensation, try to find the best way to describe it (e.g. it’s like a dense ball stuck in my throat).
• Check back in with the sensation to see whether that description fits well enough, or whether you need to change it or add to it (e.g. it’s not just stuck, it’s like it’s rammed in there, like a cork in a bottle).
• Sit with the feeling, with interested curiosity, not trying to change it, or to force it to communicate: just being with it gently and curiously. Try to understand it from it’s point of view. Notice any words, images, or metaphors that come to mind. In focusing books and websites you can read about different questions that you could ask it at this point, if it feels okay to do so.
• When it feels ready to finish you can express gratitude to the feeling, and to your body, and reassure it that you’ll keep coming back to listen to it – and other feelings – in this friendly way.

Going back to Inside Out this is a lot like Riley actually giving kind attention to each of the emotions inside her whenever any of them want her attention, instead of putting one of them in charge, or trying to get rid of others. However, when we do this practice what we often find is that the feelings we become aware of are the ones that are preventing us from feeling other feelings (like Joy in the movie). You might start feeling a sensation of fear or sadness, for example, and then a strong feeling of anger or disgust at yourself for having that feeling. When we have these feelings-about-feelings the thing to do is to sit with them just as gently and curiously as with the original feeling. It can help to remind ourselves that – like Joy in Inside Out –  these feelings are trying to keep us safe, even if what they are actually doing is the opposite.

Of course, given how many years most of us have spent suppressing and avoiding certain emotions, it can take a while to open up this kind of line of communication. Practices like focusing can feel very unfamiliar at first and can take a while to get the hang of. There are ways of doing them with a friend, or with a therapist, if that feels easier and more supported than doing them alone.

However I am convinced of the power of these kinds of practices. Elsewhere I wrote about what happened last year when I sat and noticed a couple of feelings that usually felt too overwhelming, or too insignificant, to sit with.

Earlier this year I went to a focusing workshop. In the first practice I found it fascinating to see how my own throat tightness shifted and opened up when I finally gave it some gentle attention. In the second practice I used focusing to go back to a specific memory when I hadn’t treated myself very kindly. sitting with the memory I suddenly became aware of a side of myself that I hadn’t seen there before: A playful side of myself that wanted to do something silly and outrageous to cut through the situation. I got a strong image of Mr. Tickle from the Mr. Men books. So much so that I went out a bought myself a Mr. Tickle mug the following week. Perhaps my own Goofball Island hasn’t been completely destroyed after all!

Find out more

The ideas in the post are also presented in my Staying with Feelings zine.

You can find out more about the compass of emotions in this book and video by Emmy Van Deurzen.

A great book about the messages we receive about emotions is Transforming Emotion by Glenda Fredman.

If you want to find out more about focusing practising, The Power of Focusing by Ann Weiser Cornell is an excellent introduction to it (and nowhere near as wacky as it looks from the cover!) There are also lots of resources on The Focusing Institute and British Focusing Association websites.

Note: Some of the images in this post are Copyright (c) 2015 The Walt Disney Company and Pixar Animation Studios, to whom I express my grateful thanks.

The post Inside Out: Getting in Touch with Our Emotions appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

For the last few months I’ve been thinking a whole lot about the social side of mental distress. It feels really important to me to recognise how our suffering is embedded within our relationship dynamics; our workplaces, communities and other institutional systems; and our wider society.

I often notice what a relief it is for me – and my friends and clients – when we realise this social element to our suffering: particularly how the self-criticism that we do so constantly is something that everybody else does as well, because we’re all in this self-critical culture. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with us. It’s understandable.

This week I’m speaking at a few conferences which touch on themes of inequalities, individualising and intersectionality, and on mental health and mindfulness. So I thought – instead of the usual stand-up presentation – I’d make a zine that captures my experiences of these things, and makes some suggestions about how we might creatively engage with them.

It was also a good opportunity – for me – to get back into making comics: something I’d love to do more of, especially now I’m working on a comic introduction to queer theory with a professional artist. Here’s one of the comics I made for the zine. You can download the whole zine at the end of this post if you’d like to read it more clearly.

For my zine, the comics really helped me to understand how intertwined all these social levels are – as are the inequalities that we suffer from, and benefit from, and the ways in which we are individualised and individualise others.

You can download the zine as a pdf by clicking on the link below. I’d suggest printing it out as a booklet to get the full zine experience – or just reading it online. There’s also a whole book on mindful therapy by me here (including more comics!) if you’re interested in reading further on the topic.

SocialMindfulnessZine

The post New Zine! Social suffering and social mindfulness appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

They asked me to submit something that particularly addressed mental health in the context of relationships, so I wrote this article on supporting people in our lives when they’re struggling.

Most of us will experience a mental health difficulty like depression, anxiety or addiction during our lives. And at some point, most of us will have a friend or family member who is mentally unwell.

Our culture tends to view people with mental health problems in one of two ways. Either they have brought it on themselves and need to ‘pull their socks up’, or they have a ‘disorder’ and need help because they’re incapable of helping themselves.

When faced with a friend who is suffering it is tempting either to blame them for their problems and try to shake them out of it, or to leap into ‘rescuer’ mode and try to fix them.

Neither extreme is a good solution. We can end up angry and resentful if we hold them responsible for their problems, or burnt out from all our attempts to help. They can end up more defeated and self-critical than ever if they feel culpable, or kept in a guilty and powerless state if they can’t respond to our efforts.

As a therapist and psychology academic I am often asked to give advice on supporting friends when they’re in difficulty. Here are seven thoughts on how you can help without either rescuing or blaming.

1. Listen.

If we’ve had a particular difficulty ourselves, or know somebody else who has, it’s easy to assume we know what it’s all about. But these things can be very different for different people, so it is vital to start with listening to what it’s like for your friend. Some people experience depression as a flat low feeling, whereas for others it feels more desperate and frightening. Some people harm themselves for a release of tension, whereas for others it is a punishment, or a kind of soothing.

Similarly we might have thoughts about what will help our friends based on our own experiences or assumptions, but it is better to check in with them. If they are struggling they may not know for sure what’s best, but they might know what to avoid because it makes things worse. You could make a list together of some possibly helpful things to experiment with.

2. Be present with them.

Once somebody has a label like ‘depression’, ‘PTSD’ or ‘personality disorder’, people around them often start to treat them very differently. If somebody was distressed, or quiet, or acting strangely last time we saw them, it is easy to expect that they’ll be the same the next time. Often one of the best things we can offer, as a friend, is to be present with them however they are on this particular occasion, instead of treating them as their label, or as how they were last time.

It can be useful to have some time out ourselves, before seeing them, in order to put ourselves in a good place to be with them as they are today. We may have to scale down the kinds of things we normally do together, but doing an activity that isn’t all about their mental health can really help.

3. Get support yourself.

If somebody we care about is suffering it can take a big toll on us too, for all kinds of reasons. We may feel guilty or hopeless, we might give a lot of our time and energy to supporting them, or we might find ourselves picking up on their feelings and finding that we’re also low or anxious after seeing them. It’s important that supporters get support too. Think about who you could lean on a little more. There are helplines and counsellors available for carers and others in supporting roles.

4. Know the limits of what you can offer.

When somebody is suffering we often want to do anything we can to help, and it is easy to offer more than we’re able to give. The experience of offering something and then having to pull it away again can be rough on both of you. If your friend asks for a particular kind of support it is okay to ask for some time to think about it before responding. Think about the other demands in your life, what your limitations are, and how long you might be able to offer it for.

5. Be part of a wider support network.

Linked to point 4, everyone has different skills and none of us can be everything to somebody. You might be great at practical support but not very good at sitting with somebody who is crying. You might be a wonderful person in a crisis, but need a lot of space if you’re around somebody else day in day out. For these reasons the ideal situation is to have a network of support rather than just you. Think about whether there are others – friends, family, professionals – who could offer support too.

6. Maintain your boundaries.

Most people who are suffering will be kind to those around them, but some people can become quite insular when they are struggling. It is definitely important to give them a break on this, but it is also important that you know your boundaries. For example, it’s not okay for your friend to ask you to keep the fact that you’re supporting them a secret; or to expect you to be their only means of support or their therapist; or for you to be the recipient of threats or other behaviours which would be considered abusive under other circumstances. It is okay for you to change what you can offer if these things happen, or if your situation changes.

7. Be flexible.

Finally, it is easy to get stuck in your role as your friend’s supporter. Over time this can actually make it more difficult for them to shift out of their role as the one needing support. Don’t treat your friend as somebody who only gets help and never gives it. When we’re suffering it can feel incredibly powerful to realise that we are valued and still capable of supporting others – even in small ways.

Also, there will certainly be times in your lives when your positions are reversed and you are the one needing help. After what they’ve been through your friend may well have just the expertise and experience you need, so be prepared for your roles in each other’s lives to shift over time.

More information.

Mind has an extensive section on supporting people with mental health problems, and lists of further contacts.

Rethink provides information and a helpline for carers, friends and family.

There are also support groups and helplines available for those offering ongoing support through www.carersuk.org and www.carers.org.

The post Supporting each other through mental health struggles appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I’ve come across different versions of this process in a number of places. It forms the basis of several therapeutic approaches (particularly many existential, humanistic and psychodynamic forms of therapy) and it’s also fundamental to the Buddhist mindful approach which I find so helpful, and to various other kinds of meditation. But I’ve also noticed that many friends and clients have developed something along these lines more spontaneously, without necessarily following a particular approach.

I would summarise the process something like this:

Noticing -> Understanding -> Engaging

The core idea is that before going on to attempt to understand a situation, or to engage with it, it is important to fully notice it. Another way of putting it is that any time you find yourself struggling, you just go back to noticing.

Why is noticing so important? One of my favourite authors, Pema Chödrön, uses the metaphor of a glass of dirty water. This one particularly connects with me because I often start my days watching the Thames, which is, as we know from The Kinks, a ‘dirty old river’! I imagine a glass of Thames water in front of me. It is murky and unclear because it’s all churned up with mud and silt and rubbish. We can’t see anything clearly when it’s like that, so what we have to do is to let it be still for a period of time. That allows the dirt to settle at the bottom of the glass and the water on top to become clear.

Pema suggests that part of why we often don’t want to allow this to happen is the fear that we have of what we might see once it all settles. I imagine that the bottom of the Thames is a pretty scary place with all the junk and slime and probably even skeletons that have accumulated there over the years. What might loom at you out of the murky gloom if you gave it the chance? But the point is that any kind of understanding of our own accumulated mess – and the things we’ve tried to bury in there – is only possible if we allow the water to settle.

Rushing past noticing

Generally when I’m struggling with something I don’t give things time to settle – quite the opposite. My habitual response is generally to rush to either the engaging or the understanding parts of the process.

I think that rushing to engage is probably the most common one for me. I start my day with something bothering me from the previous day, or just a general sense of anxiety, unease or irritation. Instead of giving that any time I get straight into my work. Or perhaps I’m at the end of the day and something that’s happened is troubling me but I just launch into watching TV or socialising. When I do that, often there is a sense of something under the surface which is getting bigger and more frightening the more I try to push it down under all the busy-ness and distractions. When I finally stop work or turn of the TV it can feel much more fearsome than it did at the start, and I often realise that I haven’t really been present to whatever I was working on, or enjoying what I was watching, because it is nagging away in the background.

Rushing to engage also often takes the form of trying to stop the feeling before it gets a hold by reacting immediately. This is what happens when I respond straight away to a difficult email, or I lash out at somebody who has upset me, or I make a snap decision about a tough situation. Often when that happens I’m aware that I haven’t dealt with the situation as well as I might have: I’ve passed the difficult feeling on to someone else in a crappy kind of domino effect, or I’ve exacerbated a problem rather than helping with it. The idea of refraining from acting until I’ve spent some time noticing is helpful to me in these situations.

The other alternative to rushing to engage is rushing to understand. This is something I often do when my emotions are particularly painful: feeling really low, panicky, or angry, for example. I’m very troubled by how tough it feels. It doesn’t seem to make any sense to feel this bad. I’m desperate to understand it because I think that will stop the feeling. What often happens is that I end up going round and round and round analysing it and trying to find an answer. It’s easy then to layer more and more difficult feelings on top of the original feeling. I’m worried about feeling down; and then I’m angry at myself for being worried about feeling down; and then I’m depressed at the fact I’m angry at myself for being worried about feeling down – and on and on and on.

The struggle to understand can easily land me in a place where I decide there must be something wrong with me for having this out-of-proportion reaction, or there must be something wrong with the external circumstances in my life (this job is bad, this relationship is wrong, it’s this other person’s fault). So I can tip into either depression or conflict with another person or situation.

What is noticing?

An alternative to rushing to either engage or to understand is to slow down and stay with the original feeling or situation, and just to focus on noticing it. Each time I feel drawn to trying to understand it, or to get up and do something, I can try to bring myself back to the original experience and just really notice what it is like.

When I have managed to do this there is a real sense of things beginning to clear like the water in the glass. A kind of understanding begins to emerge naturally from the process of noticing, in a very different way than when I’m attempting to force myself to understand what is going on. By the end of the process I can have a much clearer sense of how to engage, often becoming aware that there are many options and that nothing has to happen immediately.

It’s important to emphasise though that it is often extremely hard to stay with difficult emotions and experiences like this. There’s a reason why we rush to distract ourselves or try to force the feeling to go away. This noticing is such a radically different approach that it takes time to cultivate.

Pema suggests that noticing involves regarding difficult feelings as friendly and supportive rather than as fearsome and threatening. That is one of the hardest parts for me. In the last week I’ve tried to approach two of my least favourite emotions in this way: one I call ‘the plummet’ which feels like falling into a deep dark pit of despair and self-loathing with no warning and no time to catch hold of the sides. The other is a kind of gritty grainy feeling of being slightly bored and pissed off and bothered by everything. Neither of those states feels friendly to me. I do not want to look at them closely. I just want to find a way never to experience the plummet ever again, and to shake off the grainyness when it comes on.

But this week I tried to just be with the feelings and notice them, trying to describe their texture, temperature and colour; really experiencing the sensations that arose in my body; widening out to notice how they unfold in time (What happens immediately beforehand? What is the overall situation I’m in when they happen? How do they tend to play out?) I tried to assume that the feelings were sensible, helpful things to have happened, it was just that I didn’t know yet why they were sensible, and I needed to listen more carefully and kindly to them until they did make sense: however long that took.

I found that after some time of staying with them, and curiously noticing them in this way, lots of things started to occur to me that hadn’t before. It was like a process of joining the dots as all sorts of connections started to come to me. There was a feeling of weight lifting and being able to see things much more clearly and calmly for a while.

How could we build this into our lives?

I think there are two major challenges to building such noticing practices into our lives. The emotional challenge is that it is generally the very last thing that we actually feel like doing when we feel bad. The practical challenge is about when and how we actually do it.

Pema suggests that it can be good to start with emotions that are not too difficult rather than launching in with the really tough stuff. You can even start when you’re not actually in that emotional state, but rather when you’re feeling okay. Just remembering the last time you felt a bit bad and trying to notice what it was like. You can just do it for a few minutes at first, and then do the same thing for a positive emotion to balance it out a bit. In this way the process of noticing can be gradually built in in ways that don’t feel too threatening.

Another important thing is giving ourselves time for these processes. Often when a tough thing hits we’re not in a position to go off for an hour and sit with it. We might not even get that opportunity for several days. So what I’ve started to do is to ask other people in my life for time, and to give time to myself. So, for example, if a difficult issue comes up, I ask the other people concerned to let me slow down and think about it for a while, and I also schedule in some time for myself to do that. And if that isn’t enough I ask for more or give myself longer. I’ve got a list of decisions that I want to consider and conversations that I want to have with people and a rough idea of when I’m going to get to them (some this week, some next month, some next year!)

As for the question of when we do these practices, obviously it is tough to build noticing into busy lives, and I know that I’m extremely privileged to have a job which is more flexible than most and which actually involves thinking and writing about this kind of stuff regularly. Different things definitely work for different people, but I find it helpful to have some check-in time for noticing at the start of the day. I take a cup of coffee outside wherever I am and sit for however long I have available. I often find it helpful to read or listen to a helpful book for a while beforehand, often on the journey to wherever I’m going that day, to get me in the right state of mind.

Something that I’m sure would be helpful, but which I struggle to do, is to take a few minutes out for noticing whenever something difficult bubbles up during the day. People sometimes use such moments to go to the bathroom and have a couple of minutes breathing space alone. Similarly the end of the working day can be a good point to take ten minutes before embarking on the evening, and/or it can be good to take some time just before going to sleep. I should emphasise that I do none of these things regularly myself – it is not easy! Also I’ve avoided using the word ‘meditation’ here. That can be offputting because it sounds like a ‘special’ kind of practice and can come with a lot of baggage. Whilst I have found formal meditation to be a good place for noticing, the most helpful noticing I’ve had recently happened while I was sitting on a train looking out of the window and listening to music on my phone. Other people find that they do noticing on long walks, or while they’re cycling or driving, for example.

Noticing doesn’t have to be a completely internal thing. I’ve always found that writing helps me a lot with it. So I take an hour in a café once a week to write in a journal about all the things that are going on, trying to focus on describing them rather than attempting to figure them out. A combination of just sitting and reflecting for a while and then writing can help. Drawing or other forms of expression work better for other folks. And, of course, some people use therapy as a place to do this kind of noticing with another person to guide them through the process (finding the right person, who you have a good rapport with, and who helps you to create such a space, is the key here). Or you can set up times with friends where you’ll each take turns to help the other person to talk through what’s going on for them, with a focus on noticing rather than trying to explain or solve the problem.

Sometimes what you notice when you are noticing is that the thoughts and feelings you’re having just shift and change by themselves; other times the noticing leads to more of a sense of the water settling and seeing things more clearly; sometimes all you notice is just how hard noticing is, and how you spend the whole time drifting off, or trying to analyse it, or wanting to stop. And if those things happen then they, in themselves, become something to notice.

Find out more

There’s more about how to do these practices in my zines on Staying With Feelings and Plural Selves.

The post Dealing with the tough stuff: The value of noticing appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

My own position on mental health is that we all struggle, sometimes, with experiences of fear, sadness, anger, loss, shame, etc. which make life very difficult. Perhaps one of the most challenging times is when everyone in a relationship is struggling at the same time.  That is what I will mostly focus on here.

I went to a very interesting workshop on this topic at the weekend which helped me to think through some of these issues. The workshop highlighted the fact that many people had shared experiences and had developed similar, very helpful, strategies for dealing with them. Of course I won’t write anything here about specific examples given because the workshop was confidential, but I do want to thank the other people there for helping me to clarify my ideas as well as for giving me the confidence to write this post.

Pressure to seem fine

The backdrop to why struggling is hard in relationships is the pressure that we are under to prove that our relationship is ‘fine’ at all times. People are often very fearful that if they admit that they have any difficulties, friends and others will say that it is the relationship that is at fault. Given that relationships are inevitably challenging, this can reinforce concerns that most of us have that perhaps there is a problem with our relationship.

For people in less conventional relationships, this issue may be exacerbated because any acknowledgement that things are not perfect could be taken, by others, as proof of what they always suspected: that this kind of relationship can’t work.

Such fears often mean that, when we are struggling, we don’t let anybody else in besides our partners. This can put strain on the relationship in multiple ways. We might feel that we are entirely responsible for our partners’ struggles (and for making them better) and that they are entirely responsible for us in return. Also, if everybody is presenting a perfect relationship and a struggle-free self to the world, then we can feel very alone knowing that we don’t really fit that.

Wanting to stop partners from struggling

One result of all this is that we can end up constantly monitoring our partners for any sign that they are starting to struggle, and then – if they do show signs – trying to cheer them up or prove that they are being irrational. This, of course, is rarely helpful and often makes it more, rather than less, likely that they will feel anxious, self-critical, or hopeless.

Perhaps part of this aim to stop partners from stuggling is the fear that we too will be drawn down into the suffering that they are experiencing. If we have had really difficult times ourselves in the past then this fear makes a lot of sense, but unfortunately the reaction to it (trying to stop anyone from feeling bad ever) is pretty unhelpful!

Instead of trying to prevent ourselves, and our partners, from ever struggling, we can try to acknowledge that we will all go through easier and harder times, and that it is okay to be sad, anxious or angry. Paradoxically, accepting such feelings often makes them less debilitating than if we layer extra difficult emotions on top of them (feeling sad about feeling sad, fearful about feeling angry, etc.) In relationships, one great thing we can offer our partners is acceptance that however they are feeling is acceptable and sensible given the situation they find themselves in.

Another part of this is recognising that just because a partner is feeling something, doesn’t mean that we have to feel it too. We might feel guilty if we are having a great time in life, whilst a partner is going through a difficult period. However, we are often of more use to them, and to ourselves, if we can hold both those things simultaneously (rather than trying to make them feel as good as us, or sinking down because they are struggling).

Different things work for different people at different times

What about those times when everyone in a relationship is having a hard time at the same time? Perhaps the most important answer is that different things work for different people at different times. For some people, at some times, it may be better to separate off and/or get support elsewhere, whilst others, at other times, find it good to get together for some mutual kindness.

An important part of this is recognising that, even in relationships where people have a lot in common, they might need quite different things when they are having a tough time. For example, some people long for physical contact whilst others find any kind of touch difficult. Some need to talk it all through till they feel better and some find words difficult. Some really want to be alone, whilst others find isolation incredibly hard at such times. And some like others to try to fix things whilst others just want to feel understood. Mutually respectful conversations about what different people find useful when things are difficult can be extremely useful, especially because it can be very hard to articulate these things in the moment when we are suffering.

Here are just a few ideas which might be helpful, and it can also be helpful to remember that all these options are available.

Stepping up

A great example that came up in the workshop, which I’ve experienced myself, was of spider phobia. I used to be somewhat scared of spiders myself, always asking somebody else to get rid of them. But I noticed that when I was with a partner who was very scared of spiders, I became much braver and actually rather enjoyed being the one to wield the glass and postcard.

Something similar often happens when more than one person is struggling. One person somehow realises that they do have a bit more strength or energy than they thought, and steps up to do some looking after, supporting, or problem-solving (whatever is necessary). It can be empowering to realise how much more we often have than we think we have, even when we’ve had a rough day or things are hard and we thought that we had nothing left.

The important caveat to this is that it can become problematic if it is always one person who becomes the ‘stepper upper’ in such situations. Getting stuck in roles (such as the emotional one and the rational one, or the victim and the rescuer) often leads to problems. So it is worth, when you are not struggling, having a conversation about how you might ensure that that doesn’t happen.

Getting space

When more than one person is struggling and the struggles seem to be spiralling everyone into even worse places, it can be a very good idea to recognise this and get some time apart. This can happen, for example, when everyone feels that the difficulties they are having right now are much bigger than those that the other person/people are having, and keeps trying to show how much more desperate a place they are in. It can also happen when needs are very incompatible at that time (e.g. one person wanting silence and one wanting to talk).

Again, it can be useful to have agreed plans for what will happen at such times (how to ask for time out, where to go, how to know when to approach each other again, etc.)

Support from outside

It is wonderful if there are people in your lives who recognise that acknowledging difficulties doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with you or with the relationship (often quite the opposite). If we can cultivate friendships like this then it can often be good to go to those people at times when people in the relationship don’t have much to offer each other because they are struggling so much. Often an outside perspective can be a breath of fresh air, and taking the weight off a partner can allow them time to get to a stronger place.

Again, it can be helpful to lift our sense of responsibility that we should always be in a position to be able to help our partners, and to recognise that we can’t always offer that, and that sometimes being alone, or with other people, might be more useful.

Kindness and calmness

When we are weathering storms together with partners (whether the same storm, or different ones), it can often be helpful to focus on very calm, kind activities rather than trying – for example – to fix everything or to carry on with our plans as normal. For example, we might retreat to bed, cuddle up in front of the television, read each other stories, or go out for a walk together somewhere that feels safe. It’s good to acknowledge that we don’t have much to offer and to think what we have got available, and what activities might be helpful all round. Making sure that we get the basics (food, rest, and some physical activity) can also be very important at such times.

When we are being kind and calm to each other we can often stop the tough stuff from spiralling any deeper and create the right conditions for a gradual improvement. Instead of flailing around desperately trying to fix things immediately, we can find some safety and comfort where we are now, remembering that things will inevitably lift, and will be more likely to do so if we don’t force it.

I hope that some of these ideas will be helpful, and that Mental Health Day enables all of us to reflect on how we are all able to contribute to each others’ mental health: We can add to others’ sense of pressure and alienation, or we can ameliorate it by being open about our own struggles and by offering what we have available.

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Certainly it is extremely important to make support available when people are struggling. However, these news reports seem to miss something by regarding this purely as a health issue, and by focusing only upon treatment once mental health difficulties are present rather than also considering measures which may prevent such problems or increase resilience.

The fact that so many people suffer with issues such as depression and anxiety has implications far beyond the health service, and the focus on targeting funds only at treatment for existing mental health problems seems somewhat blinkered.

As a starting point, here is a list of other arenas which could usefully attend to statistics on mental health and shift policy and practice accordingly. In all of these areas a broader biopsychosocial understanding of the experience of mental health problems would be of value:

Education

Many of the negative patterns of thinking about, and treating, ourselves when we are struggling are laid down in childhood and adolescence, and experiences such as bullying, alienation, abuse or neglect in youth certainly increase our vulnerability. For this reason we could put more resources into addressing problematic school cultures and into cultivating the kinds of emotional and social skills that we know to be helpful during the early years of life. It seems strange that we wait until people are really suffering before teaching them how to understand, and work with, painful emotions and difficult relationships.

The workplace and employment

Viewing mental health as a purely internal personal matter neglects the role that the world around us has on whether or not we find ourselves struggling. Situations of workplace bullying or harassment, and toxic cultures where everyone is expected to work long hours or where employees are not valued, are certainly implicated in suffering and could be usefully addressed by awareness raising and increased resources.

Additionally, the perception of mental health difficulties could be usefully addressed on an organisational level. Destigmatising mental health problems such that employees are able to say when they are struggling could help a great deal, as could allowing everyone a few ‘stitch’ days a year when they take time out to look after themselves (after the phrase ‘a stitch in time saves nine’).

Finally, many find that some kind of employment – whether of a more or less conventional type – acts as a buffer against mental health problems in various ways. It can provide an income, give a structure and routine to the day, enable some form of contact with others, and ideally provide a sense of meaning and purpose. As a culture we seem to have swung from a situation of encouraging those who are struggling not to work (in ways which often increases their isolation and sense of being unable to do so), to one of forcing people who have become used to not working back into work. Resources could be usefully put into finding a more balanced and supportive approach.

Media

There could be greater recognition of the role of media in encouraging a certain way of viewing and treating ourselves, which many authors have linked to problems like anxiety and depression. Research consistently links limited beauty ideals to body image anxiety, but it goes further than that. Advertising, and much other media such as magazines and self-help books, often rely on encouraging people to think that there is something wrong with them that needs fixing (in order that they will buy a product). Makeover shows, reality TV, and popular contests like X-factor promote a limited idea of what it is to be a successful person, and arguably exacerbate a sense of failure among those who don’t meet the standard. The sense that we need to monitor ourselves and compare ourselves against others is opposite to the kind of compassionate and kind treatment that many regard as the key way of avoiding/combating problems like depression.

Wider culture

News articles often neglect to report the differences in rates of diagnosis of mental health problems. All of these suggest that those in more marginalised groups are more prone to such difficulties. Again, this suggests that access to individual counselling and therapy should not be the only approach to dealing with this problem. Attending to societal inequalities and injustices is vital, not just from a human rights perspective, but also from a mental health perspective.

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