I think I have written/spoken about this piece of my life ad nauseum and I am here to do it again. There have been a couple of key shifts in my life over the past couple of decades but the most instrumental one, besides me getting sober in 2000, was 2018. My kids were 5 and 3. My mental health was at it’s absolute worst. I felt incredibly unhappy IN SPITE OF THE FACT that I had everything I had ever wanted. I was staying at home with my 2 kids that I had prayed for so wholeheartedly, but I was overwhelmed. I wanted to be the very best mom that I could be by sacrificing all of myself and I was exhausted. I was so depleted that I didn’t have anything to give and was not being a good mom or wife. I wasn’t able to give them something I didn’t have for myself. In 2018, I began a year dedicated to self care. I wrote a blog post about the lessons I learned that year and am sharing it here in case you want to see some of the things I did. That year was a catalyst for some massive transformations in my mindset and in the way I treat myself. I thought I would share a bit more about that in another post, dedicated to SELF CARE.
I had started to write this post as a “How To” guide. I changed my mind because there is no blanket way to achieve joy in one’s life, no one size fits all solution. Instead, I’m going to write my posts as I share in 12 step meetings, from my own personal experience. If something resonates with you, then maybe it’s something to try in your own life. You are the only person who knows exactly what you need.
There isn’t much of a difference in the way my days look now compared to my days in 2018. If you wrote everything down on paper, it would probably look identical. The difference was how I felt. I was exhausted and burnt out in 2018. I was in desperate need of self care but I was scared of not being there for my children. Today, I spent a great deal of time taking care of my needs first and in turn, I am a healthier, more loving mother who has a greater capacity to care for my children. The only difference is my ability to see my life from a place of gratitude.
The shift wasn’t easy and involved much more than just positive affirmations. I have worked really fucking hard over the past 4 years to feel the way I do now, which is why I wanted to share some of that with others. It began with the commitment to myself in the form of self care. I wasn’t exactly sure what I needed so I just started to do things that sounded good. I meditated, had daily walks, hired a babysitter, etc. I started painting and I took a bunch of photography classes. I joined a kundalini yoga community and I started to declutter and redecorate my home. I found a bunch of things that I really enjoyed doing and started doing them.
The not fun part was that I also started journaling. I started reading about self care and self healing. I diligently went to my therapist. I worked steps with my 12 step sponsor. I sat through long periods of discomfort while actively confronting old wounds that needed to be healed. I gave myself permission to let go of the need to diet and I struggled with how my body changed as I worked through the process of intuitive eating. It was an extremely uncomfortable process and I had periods of discomfort that I gently pushed myself to sit through and endure. The result that came on the other side of all of that evaluation and discomfort was a person who embraces my faults (most of the time), treats myself so so well, and lives a fairly joyful life.
If someone wanted to simulate my experience in an effort to change his/her own life experience, here are some suggestions I would give.
- Start by journaling. This is always my #1 suggestion and it’s the one that people hate the most. It took me a long time to get consistent, but to me, writing out our thoughts is the number 1 way I can get a birds eye view to what’s going on in my head. There is a completely different experience of my thoughts when they float around, unorganized, in my head, verses writing them on a piece of paper.
- Quiet time. People tend to not like this suggestion either. More often than not, I hear “I can’t meditate because my thoughts are too crazy”. Instead of calling it meditation which comes with a certain stigma, I suggest quiet time, however you want to get it. You can go for a walk without your phone. You can sit quietly in a chair without your phone. The idea is that we are inundated with stimuli all the time and our nervous systems are stressed out. Adrenal fatigue is a huge problem for our immunity and mental health. We have to learn how to get away from the noise and sit with ourselves. I KNOW it’s hard, I’m an enneagram 7, we spend all of our time trying to not be with ourselves. It’s in those quiet moments that we allow the truth of what’s bothering us to arise. Even if it’s difficult, I suggest doing it anyway.
- Schedule an appointment with a therapist and keep going to that therapist, even when you think you don’t need to. I think we’re past the point where there is still a stigma around therapy but in case we aren’t, I have been seeing a therapist for 15 years. My daughter sees a therapist. Therapy is one of the most helpful tools one can have and in fact, if you only do one thing from this list, I suggest doing this thing.
- Figure out a way to do something that you don’t typically do. This is a hard suggestion to give because everyone is different. For me, I needed to get OUT of my head and INTO my body. Kundalini Yoga was instrumental in doing that for me. A lot of my healing really had to come through physical movement and physical meditation. Talk therapy was important to understand my thoughts but kundalini yoga was what helped me unearth the things stored in my body. You can do a google search to get all kinds of information about this but I wanted to publish something more science based because I know this is a difficult theory to understand.
- Allow emotions to exist. Emotions are the body’s data collectors. They aren’t bad, they are trying to tell you something is wrong. When we let go of the idea that we aren’t supposed to have emotions and start to focus on what they are trying to tell us, that is when we truly elevate in understanding ourselves and what we need. The best book to get you started on this is by Tara Brach and it’s called Radical Acceptance.
- Get organized in a non shaming, super supportive way. Getting organized and understanding how to structure my day has been extremely effective in helping me get tasks done, not get lost in my adhd brain, and make sure I am taking care of myself and taking care of my house/kids. The Lazy Genius is a really great tool, both the book and the podcast. I also suggest this tiktok account.
Here are some of the mindsets I had and can still have that have been unhelpful in my mental health journey.
The Loop : it’s a loop because you just keep going around in circles, never getting off, kind of like a hamster on a wheel.
An example: the structure/failure loop: I am unhappy with the way I look because I do not fit the standards of what society says is pretty and I think what will fix me and make me happy is being thin so I obsessively plan diet/workouts routines #fitspo and do well on said plan for (insert amount of time) until I fall off of the wagon, feel guilty and shameful about falling off of the wagon, binge for (insert amount of time) then decide to finally get my shit together and start obsessively planning again. Rinse, repeat.
Dimissive Thinking: don’t allow negative emotions because we need to be grateful but never actually process the negative emotion so it keeps coming up repeatedly
An example: I’m feeling fat today but I’m not supposed to feel fat because I am on an intuitive eating journey and body positive journey and when you’re on that journey you’re not allowed to feel fat so I am going to say affirmations in the mirror even thought that’s not actually working because I feel fat.
Another example could be: I’m angry at my friend because of _______ but I’m not supposed to be angry because I am a positive person and so instead of dealing with the anger in a productive way, I’m just go to pretend like I’m not angry.
The Ticker Tape: thoughts running through my mind in a very low, subtle way kind of like a ticker tape
I don’t know if this is universal or just specific to me but there are times when I have a dull hum running through my brain. They aren’t active thoughts like “I feel fat”, they are subtle and I almost don’t recognize they are there until I journal or talk to someone about how I am feeling. They are almost always negative self talk or something that is causing anxiety
An example: a feeling of not being worthy of good things like a new car or taking an afternoon break from cleaning – a gentle push towards constant productivity because we are measured by what we accmplish
The most basic treatment for those mindsets are present moment awareness. The challenge is that, at least for me, it takes years to cultivate that. It takes practice in the form of quiet moments and journaling. It takes dedication and persistence in the belief that you are worthy of good things and that you don’t always have to be productive. It takes sitting in the quiet and allowing your mind to be crazy. It’s is okay to sit down and have your mind race for 10 minutes. The practice of sitting in the discomfort of that is extremely beneficial but difficult. When I let go of the idea that sitting quietly meant I was supposed to have a clear mind and instead, allowed myself to sit quietly in the midst of my chaotic mind, a huge shift happened in allowing myself to be imperfect because the quest to have a perfectly still mind during meditation is perfectionism at it’s finest.
Another helpful tool is giving ourselves permission to show up exactly as we are. Be aggressively imperfect. Do you spend too much money and you wish you didn’t, great, me too. Do you want to exercise daily but you can never seem to make it happen, awesome, me too. Do you keep yelling at your kids even though you’ve listened to a thousand gentle parenting books, 100% me too. It doesn’t mean that we will be that imperfect forever, but it does mean that we are giving ourselves Grace and loving ourselves anyway, because we deserve it. So give yourself permission to be imperfect today.
If you are in a difficult place right now, I promise it will get better. The only consistent thing in life is change, so know that this too shall pass. In the meantime, I hope you can begin to care for yourself and treat yourself with lots of love and Grace.
