Most of my life has been controlled by my mental health conditions. Before my diagnosis, my OCD made me believe that only certain things were safe and okay. After my diagnosis, I found myself walking on eggshells most of the time because I didn't want to upset the delicate balance I had achieved with my mental health conditions. I was overly cautious to the point of being avoidant because I was afraid that something, anything or everything might cause a panic attack or an OCD spiral, even when something hadn't been a trigger for either of my conditions before. In other words, I treated my mental health conditions like the big, scary monsters under the bed that might jump out and grab me at any time if I stepped even one toe out of my carefully defined safety area.
Until about 3 years ago, I was afraid to think about my mental health conditions. I was afraid to talk about my mental health conditions a lot. I was even afraid to read past journal entries in which I wrote about my mental health struggles. I was terrified that doing any of those things would bring forth my symptoms. I had worked (and was still working) so hard to be "okay" that I didn't want to do anything that might be considered angering the beast, so to speak.
Checking in with your mental health, making sure that you're aware of how things are affecting your mental health, and being mindful of your triggers are all great things to do. Those things are crucial to having a good co-existence with your mental health condition(s) and having a self-care routine that actually helps.
However, being so cautious that you become avoidant because you're AFRAID of your mental health condition and its symptoms, like I was, is not checking in and being mindful. Tiptoeing around your mental health condition because you're afraid of causing symptoms to occur is actually a thing that creates MORE space in your mind for your mental health condition to run amuck, because in tiptoeing around it, you spend a lot more time thinking and worrying about it than you would if you weren't being so careful of it. So, the more time you spend fearfully thinking about it and worrying about it, the more space you create in your mind for the things you're afraid of to happen. By being afraid of my OCD and panic disorder I was actually making them worse.
Instead of greeting my symptoms with fear and trying to fight them off like a wild animal fighting to escape a predator, I had to learn to just say, "Okay, this is happening. I don't like that it's happening, but I'm still going to be okay. I know how this is going to go, and I don't need to be afraid." (I worked on this as part of regular cognitive-behavioral therapy practice and with ERP. Yes, it was unpleasant, but it was so worth it.) Over time, the fear I associated with my mental health conditions and what they were "going to do to me" lessened until I noticed I was no longer actually living in fear of my own mind. When I stopped being afraid of my mental health conditions, that's when I could fully engage in the self-care and healing part of my wellness journey.
It's impossible to make peace with something and to non-judgmentally allow it to be present when you're afraid of it. I had to stop viewing my mental health conditions as the terrifying monsters that lived in my head, and I had to learn to view them for what they actually were: chronic health conditions. Since there isn't a cure (in the truest sense of the word) for mental health conditions, I'll be living with mine as peacefully as possible or as miserably as possible for the rest of my life, depending on the way I interact with them.
I'll end with this: Having a mental health condition and experiencing symptoms is scary, but that doesn't mean that tiptoeing around it and being afraid to "anger the beast" inside your mind is the answer. That also doesn't mean that your mental illness is a monster that lives in your brain that you have to pretend isn't there to keep it from jumping out at you. You'll never have peace that way. I had to learn, with the help of my therapist, to stop fearing my symptoms and to view them non-judgmentally as a thing that happens when I live life with a chronic health condition before I could make peace with my funky brain.
No comments:
Post a Comment