Head
You probably came to these pages because you're interested in mental health and maybe looking for solutions to some inner struggles you or your loved ones are facing. If so, you're in the right place. Understanding what's happening isn't that complicated. The human mind works on natural principles, like the principle of balance. When we face psychological difficulties, it's our body's natural response to events that have impacted and hurt us. Just as physical pain alerts us to a serious injury on the body level, emotional pain signals through fear, sadness, and tension to show us where and how we need to heal our soul.
Here is more about how our bodies and minds communicate with us:
What does the head tell us?
Psychological problems are essentially signs of a wounded soul. They are natural messages from our inner self, indicating that we are living in ways that contradict our true nature. The issue is that we often don't understand or respond to these vital signals properly. Instead of listening to them, we try to silence them. Over time, this can lead to what some call mental illness—a misleading term that wrongly labels a healthy, natural response as a disease. These so-called illnesses are actually natural reactions to harmful situations and relationships we've experienced or are currently experiencing. They reflect the traumas and injuries we've endured throughout our lives, which we often unconsciously revive.
We cannot permanently escape the feelings and conditions that come with difficult life situations. We cannot turn off pain, sadness, anger, etc. In the short term, we might avoid these feelings through denial, repression or by using substances like alcohol and drugs—whether illegal or prescribed. However, these methods don't solve the problem. They only provide temporary relief, which can be helpful at times, but in the long run, they harm us and trap us in a cycle of chronicity. Ignoring and silencing the signals of a wounded soul will in no way help us get closer to the real causes of our psychological discomfort. What we need is to initiate a dialogue.
And how we can work with different feelings and states:
How can we work with that?
The way out is through—this is the basic principle. Every emotional and physical state carries an important message about our lives. These states need to be expressed, sometimes fully experienced, but most importantly, they need to be heard. To do this, we need a safe and open space where we can truly be ourselves. A space that allows us to honestly embrace different aspects of our being and experience them without conditions or judgment.
Such a space can be integrated into our everyday lives—whether it's a quiet walk in the forest, yoga, physical exercise, mindfulness, meditation, dance, music, art, or anything else we connect with because it resonates with us personally. It should be a place, activity, or relationship that we naturally return to because it allows us to express ourselves honestly.
Healing relationships don't have to be limited to professionals. It's valuable to cultivate these relationships within our immediate environment. However, the right therapy or a weekend workshop can also help us move forward, expand our perspective, and release blocks. There are many types of therapies—some focus on the body, others on the mind, energy, or spirituality. Why not explore several options? Trust your intuition when choosing, as true healing happens where you feel genuine inner trust.
Image by Freepik
For more insights on the concept of "mental illness" and understanding it, see the article on the functioning of the human psyche below. However, take it with a grain of salt. While everything is really simple and straightforward in principle, our real lives are always a complex interweaving of many levels, experiences, and states that interact and entangle.
Natural ways of the human psyche
If we live in conflict with who we are and how we feel, we cannot achieve mental health or long-term satisfaction. If our resources (e.g. joy, inner peace, life purpose ... etc.) are limited or completely blocked, depression begins to creep into our lives. Maybe external circumstances are the reason, but maybe it's that we can't even meet our own needs. Maybe we have never placed enough value on them. Maybe we have learned to push aside some of our feelings for a long time and overlook what is important to us. Something fundamental is therefore missing from our lives, and the world we have co-created can easily become a place that is really hard to live in.
When we have expectations of who we should and shouldn't be, or when we are dominated by perfectionism, performance orientation, overlooking our own limits and hiding our true feelings - it all adds up over time and becomes a deadly cocktail. Then a panic attack can easily come into our lives, like an avalanche created by ever-increasing stress and our own belief that we always have to manage everything. If we have bought into the stories that our worth depends on our performance, that we have no right to be weak and that we must not fail, we will be all the more harsh and ruthless with ourselves. It's only a matter of time before our bodies can no longer take the constant bullying.
Perhaps the gripping feelings of insecurity and fear will set in. These often stem from our own beliefs. They alert us to the disparity between the inner and outer worlds. They arise again and again from stories we learned to believe, when in fact they are misleading or even completely false and harmful. From stories that may say, for example, that the world is a hostile place, that one must not make mistakes, or that we do not deserve love (etc.). Unfortunately, we can never be good/prepared/strong enough ... and so our lives slowly become filled with anxiety.
We compensate for our inability to be kind to ourselves by taking narcotics and psychiatric medication. With some of these we try to soothe past or present hurts, with others we may achieve a short-term feeling of happiness, strength or security. With a few drinks of alcohol (or some Xanax) we can easily wash away the feeling that our life is not happy and something essential is missing from it. We nurture and develop our addictions while the actual reality of our lives does not improve. Feelings of helplessness, inadequacy and incompetence alternate with states of intoxication in regular swings. We cling to drugs, to food, to work, to other people ... just to avoid having to be with ourselves.
If we have been unlucky enough not to experience much love in our lives, fear will be winning with an increasing intensity. Our psychological states can then easily swing into neurosis and than we get our first diagnosis. We can no longer hide our inner distress from others. Other labels will be adding up to our diagnose, both from experts and from ordinary people, because we are obviously becoming "a little weird". In fact, we are actually just becoming more and more fragile and vulnerable, insecure and scared. It is clear that we can no longer help ourselves, and so we happily reach for pharmaceutical treatment to bring us at least some short-term relief.
Exposed to the world, unable to find solid ground under our feet, life becomes painful and hurtful. If we have experienced other severe traumas, family burdens, or some form of abuse in our lives, it may be best to simply disconnect from the world. Create a parallel reality in our own head. It's not a choice anymore, this just happens - psychosis is such a tool to solve the unsolvable, to cope with powerlessness, with a world that doesn't make sense and is unbearably hurtful.
But in reality, no person suffers from any mental illness. We are all just more or less hurt and scared. We were just more or less lucky with loving or, on the contrary, damaging relationships. But at the core, we all need the same thing when we are hurting. We need to be heard, we need to be given space to express our feelings, we need reassurance and the knowledge that we do not lose value for the other person. We need to perceive and experience love, tenderness, care, ... If we are not getting these fundamentally important things from the world (and from our loved ones) , it is high time to start paying attention to it. To start noticing what kind of living space we are creating for ourselves - both around us and within us.