The First Step

Ready To Move Forward? Okay, Take A Giant Step Back.

Starting the Mental Wellness Journey

That’s right, take a big ‘ol step back.

Step back and take a look at yourself. Look at a month ago, a year ago, 10 years ago… The person here with you now is comprised of experiences and missed opportunities, likes and aversions, successes and letdowns, current and former…this is where the secret to advancing lies.

As The Wiseman says, “sometimes the way forward is the way back” (Henson 1986).

What To Look For

The past is full of valuable information that we can utilize. It is here you can start developing a foundation based on what is already known. Each one of us is the expert on ourselves if we’re willing to recognize it.

Going back as far as I can, I remember how much I enjoyed walking through cemeteries since I was a small child. Whenever my family would visit my great grandmother, my aunt and I would walk a couple blocks down to the nearby cemetery. There, we would enjoy a unique quiet that only seems to settle over graveyards while reading off names and dates; remembering those lost that we didn’t get a chance to know in life. Is this a clue for moving forward?

When you look to the past to consider the following:

What Has Worked: Change and growth is difficult. You will likely be challenged by it. To protect your progress and continue to grow it’s helpful to be armed with coping skills. Coping skills, in a nutshell, are the things we do that help us tolerate hard times and support wellness during calm times. When practiced habitually, coping skills can even act as a buffer when stressors arise.

For a list of coping skills, check out some of the great links listed at the end of the article. 

• If you’ve lost them, they can be found.  It happens! We get busy and put off our daily/weekly/monthly self-care activities one by one until they go missing. Before you know it you haven’t seen your therapist in two months, picked up your guitar in four months, or been to the gym in six months! 
• Ask yourself if any of the positive actions you used to take to reduce stress or to enjoy life have fallen off. You may not notice that you have coping skills until you look back and recognize them for what they are.

• Take it further. Skills from the past may not work the same in the present. Perhaps due to growth, changing interests, or overbearing symptoms. The old skills, however, can be the key to unlocking new potential for you. Take the skill you know and find a way to amplify it.
• An example: Perhaps you used to love singing but at this time your symptoms are overpowering your desire to enjoy it. A solution may be joining a choir or trying out for a local musical theater show. Being part a social effort around singing would provide structure and direction as well as contact with others who might become new supports.
• If the social effort is not right for you or too much too soon, creating goals for yourself could be a way of providing structure. Try setting aside time every day to sing, plan to learn a new piece of music every week, or try out a singing app that provides a system with goals and prizes.

Taking all of these into consideration thus far, I recognize I haven’t been to a cemetery in a long time. It’s been a couple years now. At the time I’m writing this, the weather is warming and the sun is shining. It’s a good time to go for a walk where I know I’ll find calm and peace. I think I’ll take it just a bit further and make plans to visit the cemeteries I’ve seen from a distance on my regular travels but have never visited.

Often, we also have coping skills that may have once worked…until they didn’t. That’s because they weren’t really working in the first place.

What Has Not Worked: To cope effectively, you have to be aware of what does not work. It’s obvious that if you do not enjoy playing sports that basketball will likely not be effective as a coping skill. Truly unhealthy coping skills are less apparent than that, though, because they have served a purpose before. The difference between a healthy skill and an unhealthy one is that the unhealthy ones come with harmful consequences and are not sustainable.

A stand out example would be substance abuse. This is common due to the fast-acting nature of many substances that can be abused. Any “positive” effects are temporary and carry great risk for run-ins with the law, health problems, overdose, addiction, and an increase of uncomfortable mental and physical symptoms.

Other harmful ways to cope can include overworking, emotional eating, restricting food below recommended daily nutritional value, self-harm, bottling emotions, and aggression. All of these unhealthy coping skills are built on avoidance. Avoidance does not make the problem go away; it gives it a place to stay and room to grow.

For me, anger is both an unhealthy coping mechanism and a warning sign. I get my frustrations out, sure, but only in ways that can hurt me like yelling at loved ones who only want to help. I know I’m not using my coping skills for self-care when irritability rises and I become more snappy and unpleasant.

What Has Been Recommended: Maybe Aunt Sofia suggested yoga after you told her about anxiety making it hard to concentrate. Perhaps your general practitioner recommended small meals every few hours to build up your appetite when you found it hard to eat. Reading this also reminds you of the time you read a self-help book and it proposed using labels for organization to reduce misplacing important items like keys or your wallet.

There are a variety of reasons not to try common, healthy interventions. Whatever it was at the time, you weren’t ready for the suggestion but reasons don’t necessarily have to be constant. Circumstance and viewpoints change over time.  Check in with yourself where you are now and see if any of those proposals are possible (and of course, make sure they’re healthy).

The old me, prior to intensive schooling to become a therapist, was quite resistant to things like yoga, meditation, and mindfulness. Now, I’ve found myself enjoying yoga that incorporates mindfulness principals and see the benefits. I’m still not at a place to use mindfulness or meditation outside of the occasional yoga class (more out of unwillingness to put it in my schedule that skepticism now), but I know I’m moving in that direction.

How To Use It

You’ve looked back and have your head full of great ideas and insight. Now what?

Acknowledge that this is a starting point. There is work ahead to turn what you’ve learned into a practice. There are three typical reactions to this;

1.  Try to fit everything in all at one time!
2. Become overwhelmed and not use any of it.
3. Pick one focus and work on that, moving on to the next once the first has been addressed.

If you lean towards the first reaction you may be at risk of pushing yourself further than you can go and burning out. Starting kickboxing, re-organizing and labeling the whole house, and introducing a new bedtime routine all at once sounds exhausting and will probably feel exhausting.

The second reaction is often a result of expecting that you’ll have to do it all at once and predicting your failure before you even begin. If it seems like too many things, acknowledge that it is. Doing just one is better than none and it gets you started.

I recommend number three. Having an initial focus allows for build-up and gradual change. It may also help to isolate each addition to your wellness lifestyle. If each skill is staggered into your routine, you can better detect if they’re helping or hurting. You can figure out the starting point by trying out some of the following:

Write It Down: Taking this action gets the ideas out of your mind and into reality. Besides just making these ideas real, having them written frees up your mind. You can always go back to the list for what comes next. Because the point is for it to be a list, I’ll contradict myself by saying that it doesn’t actually have to be written. If you prefer keeping your notes and thoughts digitally on a cell phone or other device, do so. For some, audio is a better way to stay organized and remember. If that’s you, record it with a basic recorder or with a recording app.

Organize It: Once the list is made, you get to decide if and how you want to organize the information. You could start at ranking from; least challenging to most challenging; most expensive to least expensive (monetarily, physically, emotionally); or realistic to unlikely. Consider what you need to make sense of it all. You know you best, so do what works for you.

Set Up Your Success: Now comes the follow through. How will you enact these wellness strategies until you’ve developed a habit? This takes some looking in the past as well. Is there a time you were able to stick to something and follow through? What helped? What didn’t? Would you do it differently? If so, how.

• You may do well with a planner and a detailed schedule. Motivating sticky notes or dry erase board messages often provide encouragement directly from the self. Accountability from a trusted other can be helpful in the form of direct reminders, to a buddy system, to a shared calendar for checks and balances, and the list goes on. Remember to consider if what you choose is sustainable and not harmful. Feedback from trusted and supportive others can be helpful in this area.

My mom, noticing a number of families and friends in our lives have some sort of travel goals, asked me what I thought we could do together. I took the opportunity to share my desire to start visiting cemeteries. She was on board immediately. It was at this point I found out that my great mommom and a number of other family members also had an interest and affinity for graveyard visits. We might all be a little weird but we are not alone in it!

Most of all, if you take anything away from this, remember you’re making your efforts for you. You are important enough. You are motivated enough. You are enough.

Works Cited

Henson, Jim, director. Labyrinth. Henson Associates, Inc., Lucasfilm Ltd., 1986.

Coping Skill Resources

https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/coping-skills-worksheets/

https://www.verywellmind.com/forty-healthy-coping-skills-4586742

https://www.therapistaid.com/therapy-worksheet/healthy-unhealthy-coping-strategies

Share To Facebook

Share To Twitter