Right Now

     I have never been a person that could say, "I'll cross that bridge when I get to it," and mean it. Even before my anxiety symptoms appeared, I was what my mom and my grandmother called "a worrier". If there is a situation, my default setting is to worry about every single aspect and every single possible outcome of that situation all at once until I'm overwhelmed and exhausted, even if I don't need to worry about an aspect or outcome of said situation. 

    With the current health crisis, with all the other things that have happened so far this year, and with all the changes I have implemented so far, I've been worried about a lot of things. Week after week, I was taking these worries to my therapist in our bi-weekly phone sessions and telling her that I was anxious and then also exhausted from being anxious. It seemed to be a constant stream of, "What if X, Y, or Z happens, then this, this, and this could happen. And then..."

    My therapist, time and again, has had to remind me not to focus on the future in this way. She's told me over and over, "Just focus on THIS moment. The one you're in right now." She'd follow that up with the questions that I needed to ask myself to pull myself into the present moment. Questions like, "What are you doing right now? What do you have to deal with right this second? Is everything okay in just this moment? Are you okay RIGHT NOW, in just this second?"

    Usually, as I answer those questions, I'm able to say, "Right this very moment all I have to deal with is this phone therapy session. Everything is okay in this moment. I am okay in this moment." Then I'm out of the future and all the possibilities that something bad could happen, and I'm firmly in the present, where I don't have to worry about anything except my current reality. 

    It's super easy to do that while I'm on the phone with my therapist, when everything actually feels fine. It's between the phone sessions that I have trouble stopping myself once that ball of worry starts rolling around in my mind and getting bigger and bigger, like a rubber band ball, as it collects more and more worries that are littering my brain at any given moment. It takes considerably more effort for me to stop myself and ask, "What do I have to deal with, right now, in just this moment?" And, "Am I okay right now?" But...once I can break myself out of the future-centered worries and realize that, in the current moment, I am actually okay, my anxiety tends to drop.

    After being a worrier for my whole life, learning to stop myself when that ball starts rolling around in my brain is taking a lot of practice, but I can eventually get there. I still forget to do it sometimes, but learning to use new coping strategies always takes time. The point is that I'm working on it. 

    I'll end with this: Learning to focus on only the present moment when our anxiety constantly wants to take us into the future isn't easy. However, asking certain questions to pull yourself back to the present can make it less difficult. Asking yourself, "What do I have to deal with right now, in this moment?" and "Am I okay RIGHT NOW?" can be helpful ways to get yourself to a calmer, present-focused place.

Feeling All the Feelings

    Since I've been in therapy, I've slowly gotten more and more comfortable with showing emotions that aren't always positive. I've had to re-teach myself to just feel all my feelings without trying to bury them like I did for years. In the process of re-teaching myself how to actually be okay with feeling all my feelings and expressing them, I've learned that I'm a person that cries easily. If I get sad, frustrated, angry, stressed, too happy, too sentimental, or too overwhelmed, I'm more than likely going to cry. Apparently, that's just who I am as a person. 

    After I started to more openly express the emotions that aren't typically perceived as positive emotions, I noticed something about the way that people tend to think about people with mental illness. In a way, people with mental illness almost seem like they aren't allowed to express unpleasant emotions without some kind of extra judgement. The extra judgement usually falls into one of two categories. One: we're having a mental health crisis because we're expressing "negative" emotions, and our loved ones are VERY concerned. Or, two: our negative emotions are dismissed as less "real" emotions because we have a mental illness and therefore our "negative" emotions are just a symptom of that condition. Both judgments typically come with a "You need to take your medications" kind of statement.

    Recently, I felt a whole mixture of emotions because of an external situation that I have no control over. I was feeling grief. I was feeling frustration. I was feeling a deep, burning anger akin to rage, but quieter. I was feeling a deep sadness that was separate from the grief. I was also feeling a bit hopeless. And, yes, I was crying. Of course, I was crying. How could I feel all those things and not cry?

    As I was upset and crying, someone suggested that I needed to take my anti-anxiety medications. That wasn't helpful...or healthy. One of the the only things I WASN'T feeling at the time was anxious. I was a mess of emotions, yes, but anxiety wasn't part of the mess. 

    The emotions I was experiencing had nothing to do with my panic disorder or OCD and everything to do with the fact that I was a human in an unpleasant situation that I had no control over and that I couldn't change. I didn't need medication. I needed to feel what I felt and to be allowed to cry it out in order to process it, to feel better, and move on.

    Mentally ill people still have access to the full emotional spectrum, right? People with mental health conditions can experience unpleasant feelings that have nothing to do with their actual mental health condition. Our mental illness doesn't somehow make us incapable of feeling the things everybody else could feel in any given situation. Not everything we feel and think is pathological. Some of it is really just "normal" human, feeling our feelings stuff, like everybody else that doesn't have a mental health condition.

    It's also completely okay that people with mental illness (appropriately) feel unpleasant emotions. It's good. It's healthy to feel all the feelings. It doesn't mean that we're headed for some kind of break down. It also doesn't mean that we need to hurry up and take medication to make the feeling go away. It just means that we're human. People with mental illness deserve the "luxury" of being able to feel all their feelings without the assumption being automatically made that it's related to our mental stability or having the feelings dismissed.

    Here's the thing with that whole "You should take your meds" attitude that is often expressed by loved ones when someone with a mental illness expresses unpleasant emotions: the medication treats a mental health condition, it doesn't stop us from feeling. (And if it does, that might means the medication needs to be changed.) A psychotropic medication won't stop us from appropriately feeling grief, sadness, heartbreak, anger, frustration, and all the other emotions along the spectrum that other people are allowed to feel without the extra layer of judgement, and it shouldn't. 

     If we weren't living with a mental health condition, our negative emotions would be viewed and handled differently. Instead of just assuming it's part of the mental illness, which is either cause for concern or dismissal, the feelings would be legitimately addressed. Our loved ones would say, "What's going on?" And then some kind of statement like, "Okay. Do you want to do X, Y, Z until you feel better?" Instead of, "You need to take your medication." Can you see how, when mental illness isn't a factor, the response is kinder and healthier because the emotions are actually acknowledged and allowed to be felt?

    I'll end with this: Feeling all of your feelings, even the unpleasant, "negative" emotions is healthy. It's good to appropriately feel those things. Appropriate emotional responses to life and its ups and downs don't end when someone is diagnosed with a mental health condition, and all of a person's emotions don't suddenly become the symptoms of their mental illness. Saying, "You need to take your meds" when your loved one is expressing an emotion that is unpleasant isn't helpful. It can actually be hurtful.