Our Beliefs About Our Mental Health
Having a mental health problem such as Depression, Bipolar Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder, can be challenging enough without having to contend with the personal development process.
We are all looking to better ourselves in some way, and that’s what makes us human. We don’t want to feel depressed all the time, we want to experience emotional connection with someone, we want to feel good about ourselves but it can be tough when we have been diagnosed with some form of mental health problem.
There are thousands of self help gurus saying you are what you think about, and you might get angry and upset by this as nobody seems to cater to you.
The truth is, if you have a mental health problem, your world will be exactly what you are telling yourself it is like. That is the way it should be. That might sound strange saying that, but think about it for a moment. If you were like everyone else, which is presumably what you want or else you wouldn’t be on medication to treat your mental health problems, then you wouldn’t be able to distinguish yourself from everyone else in the world.
3 Ways To Think Differently About Your Mental Health
Don’t Label Yourself
Your mental health issue is not who you are it is what you are experiencing at this very moment. When you were a child, you were experiencing childhood, but you were not a child as that would imply that being a child was the definition of you. There is no clear distinction between being a child, an adolescent and an adult because the concept is totally subjective. I am an adult, but I have childlike tendencies. So when I am having toy fights with my kids am I a child or an adult, or an adult who is acting like a child. You see labels make it convenient for us to perceive the world. If you label yourself, you might find that the label is hard to get off in later life.
So many times we get stuck in the process of labeling and defining. When we do this, sometimes the labels and definitions stick. There is no place more bad at doing this than the very people who are there to treat us and that is staff in hospitals: ‘She’s the manic depressive’, ‘He’s the one with BPD’, ‘The tourettes in room 22.’
Be Mindful Of Self Talk
In order to help yourself, your self talk needs to change. Everybody is guilty of negative self talk and this article will apply to everyone and not just someone with a mental health problem.
When you talk to yourself look at what is fact and what is fiction. When you are feeling a little paranoid, and you think that people are talking about you, stop and think about it for a minute. Can you really read minds? Of course you can’t, then how do you know what people are thinking about you, you can’t it’s just impossible. Although it’s hard, you have to look at the evidence of your thoughts and conclusions. When you have the feeling that everyone is looking at you and talking about you, stop for a second and ask yourself what real evidence do you have to reach this conclusion.
If you stop in the middle of the street and look frightened and you believe everyone is looking at you as they think you are strange or whatever, of course they will be looking at you because you are looking at them in a strange manner and you’re standing still in the middle of the street looking at everyone. That is not considered ‘normal’ behaviour. So your paranoia, in this situation, is actually caused by your own actions.
Look At Your Beliefs
Your beliefs about yourself is what creates the world around you. That is a bold statement to make and a statement that can have a profound impact when you grasp its truth.
Think of a belief you have about yourself just now and keep this in mind.
When you were younger you formed some sort of belief about yourself. For the purposes of this, I will say you have the belief that you are not intelligent. The belief started somewhere, possibly in school when the teacher told your parents that you were falling behind in class and you have been moved to a foundation class (this class was known as something different by the other kids, you know what I mean). Immediately you formed the belief that you were not intelligent. It made you feel terrible, and you started to look for more evidence of it. You couldn’t figure out how to do fractions, more evidence that you were not intelligent; you couldn’t understand the english assignment, yet more evidence that you were not intelligent and so on and so forth. You actually built up a mental portfolio of evidence that you were not intelligent. Now that belief has stuck with you throughout your life.
Guess what? that belief you had was nonsense. The reason you were put into a foundation class is because the teacher hadn’t taken the time to find your learning style as she had to deal with 30 other kids and didn’t have the time needed to help you. Had she helped you, your belief about your own intelligence would have been so different and your life could have been so different. However, we are partially to blame here, as we jumped to conclusions from the outset. Our parents are also to blame as they didn’t allay our fears and reassure us that going into a foundation class didn’t mean we weren’t intelligent. So there’s all sorts of things going on here, however, the bottom line is we formed a belief at an early age and the belief was based on nothing more than a feeling. You didn’t look at the fact that you were brilliant in English and had a fantastic imagination, you didn’t look at the fact that you were amazing at woodwork, you didn’t look at other facts to back up the possible theory that you were a genius in the making, why not?
What About You?
I could talk about this subject for ages as I love talking about belief formation and how we form our opinions about ourselves.
I hope this article has helped you look at yourself in a different way or at least leads you to further research on the subject. Why not leave a comment and tell us how you feel about this.
© Steven Aitchison
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