One of the things I’ve been seeing a lot more clearly recently is the place where there’s so much programming at various levels of our society, telling us that natural processes and healthy human functioning is a disease or a disorder.
This is incredibly dangerous programming if it sticks. When it’s sticks, it becomes a belief. More specifically it’s a limiting belief that a person starts to live by and take on as true about their identity.
When someone feels anxious, it is often times because they need to make a change and move away from something that is occurring. It is an increase in energy to help move you forward. And quite often when someone is depressed, it’s because they push through far too many things and were never shown or taught how to rest, slow down or turn inward to take care of themselves with necessary recovery.
Instead of learning this when these ups or downs in energy show up in our nervous system and become signals going to our brain as our conscious experience, you were instead taught or told that’s bad or wrong. You have a disease and you need to be treated. Then the entire foundation of how view your mental health is built off of that faulty foundation.
This is not to say that there are not times when these crossed wires becomes so intense that they’re really is a mental health issue that needs time, attention and resources. These are not the cases I am talking about in this series. But the overwhelming majority of the time and at the mass number of people that are coming down with these issues there has to be something else going on.
Mental illness also is a self fulfilling cycle because it convinces you to focus even more on the mind. The mind is the “problem” oh wait but put attention there and overanalyze it. Huh???? When the antidote is almost always put more attention on rebalancing the mind with the body. The body needs more attention. The nervous system is running through both and connecting them to hold the balance but when your attention sucks up into your noggin you can become dangerously cut off from yourself and unable to actually exist in your body. This worsens everything, and your perception of life, reality and being present all can shift far out of balance.
This monthly workshop series is aimed at the many areas we can relearn and reframe common and appropriate human experiences that may have been labeled as diseases and disorders.
The first topic I am talking on is basically in a nut shell ANXIETY. But we will be talking about this through a very different lens. We are not talking about the diagnosis of anxiety. We will be talking about and exploring what it means to experience the sensations, patterns, and heightened energy that has been commonly rolled into the umbrella we refer to as feeling anxious.
I chose this topic first because in my 9 year career when I was practicing in psychiatry. This was the most prevalent. It is the one that plagued many and was also linked to so many crossed wires in perception. There is room for a lot of impact here in helping people understand themselves rather than jumping to something being wrong. And best of all we as humans are all connected and assessing the people around us. It is like emotional contagion BUT working in a healing direction. The more people there are walking around not freaking out about having normal human experiences the more others begin to feel that this is ok for them as well.
There is a bit of nuance to some of this discussion and that is why I think a workshop is the right place for such topics to be worked on together.
I am committed to bringing this discussion to depression, substance abuse, grief, trauma and many other topics as well. It is time to start having these conversations and clearing up what is starting to be dangerously out of balance.
