I believe that information which can be essential for the health of both individuals and society should be widely accessible and free from complex professional jargon, so that everyone can understand it. I write these lines with this approach in mind. Understanding what is happening is not actually that complicated - the human psyche operates on completely natural principles, such as the principle of balance. When we experience psychological difficulties, we are in fact experiencing an internal response of our body to certain events that have affected and wounded us. Just as a physical injury alerts us through pain that something serious is happening on a physical level, a wounded soul communicates with us through fear, sadness, tension, and other signals, indicating in which area of our life an injury has occurred (or is occurring), and showing us what and how we need to heal.
How does our mind communicate?
At their core, psychological problems are primarily messages about the wounding of the soul. That is their natural essence. They are messages that our inner self sends us to alert us that we are living in some form of conflict with ourselves and our needs. The problem is that we often cannot properly understand these fundamentally important messages, nor do we always know how to work with them. Very often, we try to silence them rather than listen and give them the space they need. In such cases, over time, they can develop into what some people call mental illness. However, this is a rather misleading term, because it labels as an illness something that is, in essence, a healthy response of the organism. These “illnesses” always have a cause and can generally be understood as logical and natural reactions to real situations - especially to unhealthy and damaging relationships that we have been (or still are) part of in our lives. They are expressions of wounds we have suffered along our life’s journey, wounds that we often unconsciously keep reactivating ourselves.
We cannot permanently run away from the feelings and states that are an inseparable part of life. We cannot simply turn off pain, sadness, anger, etc. At best, we can temporarily suppress them with methods such as avoidance, repression, or by using alcohol and drugs - whether illegal ones or those prescribed by a doctor. However, these means do not resolve the problem. At most, they provide temporary relief, which can sometimes be helpful, but in the long term, these strategies harm us and trap us in a vicious cycle of chronicity. Numbing and ignoring the signals of a wounded soul will not bring us closer to the true causes of our psychological distress, nor will it enable us to start healing them. In fact, it blocks genuine healing.
How can we work with that?
The way out is through - that is the fundamental principle. All emotional and physical states carry an important message about what is happening in our lives. All of them need to be expressed, sometimes fully experienced, but first and foremost, they need to be heard (meaning noticed). For this, we need a safe and open space where we can be ourselves. A space where we can honestly open up to the different aspects of our being and experience them without conditions or judgment.
Such a space can be found by ourselves and can become part of our everyday life - walking in a peaceful forest, yoga or other forms of physical exercise, mindfulness and other forms of meditation, dance, music, art, etc. Each of us is drawn to something different, and everyone needs to find what resonates with them the most—a place, activity, or relationships to which they naturally want to return because they can sincerely experience and express themselves there.
Healing relationships do not need to be sought only with professionals. On the contrary, it is highly desirable that we learn to find and cultivate such relationships within our immediate environment. However, sometimes the right therapy or a weekend workshop can move us much further, broaden our perspective, and help release blocks. There are many forms of therapy - some work more with the body, others with the psyche, and others perhaps with energy or spirituality. It certainly does no harm to try several approaches. When choosing, trust your intuition, because only where you feel genuine, deep trust can true healing processes take place.
In the following article, I offer a few more reflections on how we can look at "mental illness" differently - as a completely natural and understandable process. However, keep in mind that our real lives are always a complex web of many layers, experiences, and states that influence and entangle each other. This is why, sometimes, we need a master to help us untangle that web.
Natural ways the human psyche functions
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.
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.
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.
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 (or in todays language a personality disorder) 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.
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But in truth, no person suffers from any mental illness. We are all simply more or less wounded and frightened. 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.