Sharing Our Mental Health Journeys

Author: Asasia Richardson and Erica Caparelli

A common refrain amongst therapists is that good therapists have therapists. Just because therapists are trained to understand mental health, psychology, and coping methods doesn’t mean we are immune to the difficulties of life! Therapists also face mental health challenges, unhealthy behavioral patterns, tough interpersonal relationships, and more because at the end of the day, we are human too!

With that said, we wanted to take this opportunity to share some of the lessons we have learned through our own mental health journeys, and how we apply these lessons in how we live our daily lives.

Thoughts from Asasia Richardson, LMSW

Being able to push through most parts of your life or succeed in traditional ways does not mean you are mentally healthy.

Like many of the people who come to AGP, most of my life I was a “high achiever.” When I was growing up and in college, I excelled in school and extracurriculars and in adulthood I did equally as well at my workplaces and volunteer positions. I received consistent positive feedback from those around me, and even when I was stressed, I never managed to slip up. So I was fine, right? Wrong.

Anxiety made it incredibly difficult to do seemingly simple and innocuous tasks, I felt frequently overwhelmed, and I had persistent thoughts about others’ perceptions of me. Yet for years, I thought that I wasn’t actually struggling with serious anxiety because I was able to do so well at keeping up with my responsibilities.

The reality is, you don’t have to be debilitated before recognizing your mental health is suffering. Many people may be successful in part because of an unhealthy obsession with perfectionism, or because throwing themselves wholly into a task serves as a distraction from their most inner experiences. The truth is, if you are finding yourself often overwhelmed, avoiding engaging in normal tasks or activities, or stuck in negative thought cycles, it’s time to ask for help.

Understanding the mechanisms or reasons for your behavior is not the same as working on it. In fact, intellectualizing can be a means of avoidance.

Have you found yourself or others referring to you as “self aware?” Perhaps you have read your fair share of Instagram posts, news articles, self-help books, and even attended therapy to work through your troubles more deeply and now you have a sense of understanding the why behind your experiences. However, understanding why you are the way you are is not the same as working through and changing the behaviors or feelings you are unhappy with. Taking action is an entirely different task, and can be hard!

Insight is a wonderful skill; it gives us perspective, can offer the opportunity to validate our feelings, and is often a key step to change. However, if you stop at insight, you won’t get very far. In fact, many people engage in intellectualizing their experiences as a method to avoid actually feeling the emotions they have. So if you find yourself speaking about your problems without actually feeling strongly about them, or talking for your whole therapy session but making minimal progress, it might be worth taking a pause and trying to sit with your emotions more fully.

Practicing awareness of bodily sensations and reactions can be key.

Many of us go about our days feeling completely separated from our bodies. We don’t notice that we’re tensing our shoulders, jaws, hands, and more unless it starts to ache, or don’t realize when our breathing gets a little more shallow, or ignore a slight stomach ache until it turns into nausea. However our bodies are constantly responding and reacting to our emotions and experiences! Now, I try to pay more attention to my body because I’ve learned that usually my body is the first to react to stress or anxiety, rather than my mind. By recognizing my bodily reactions and practicing more physical calmness, I can help maintain an emotional and psychological calmness. For me, this usually looks like taking long walks, relaxing my muscles, stretching, moving into more comfortable sitting positions, and indoor cycling.

Thoughts from Erica Caparelli, LMSW

Remember, It is okay not to feel good all of the time

One of the greatest life lessons I’ve come to learn in life is that it is natural-even healthy-to feel uncomfortable feelings. I used to believe that the way I was feeling was indicative of how I was doing. If I was feeling sad or anxious, it must have been because I wasn’t working hard enough on myself, or taking good enough care of myself. If I was feeling happy feelings it must have been because I was doing all of the ‘right things’ in life. This is a very black-and-white way of thinking. 

Well this line of belief unsurprisingly leads to feelings of self-blame, guilt, and shame each time we don’t feel good. It took me a long time to learn that this way of thinking about emotions is just not true. Sometimes we can be doing all of the ‘right’ things and still feel challenging feelings--That’s life! Life is full of ups and downs; we can’t feel good all the time. If that were the case, we wouldn’t be able to appreciate the good times. Plus, we’re often doing better than how we feel.

Practicing mindfulness is something I do to help prevent falling down the rabbit hole of thinking I am not doing enough. When I am aware of my thoughts I am able to catch myself before I spiral into thinking that I need to ‘do more’ in order to feel better. Once I identify the thought, I am able to actively remind myself that it is okay not to feel okay, and that it will pass. Then I practice self-care in whatever way feels right to that moment-whether it be watching TV, calling a friend, reading a book, etc-to help stay out of my thoughts until the feelings pass. 

If we resist our feelings, they will persist

Something that people tend to do is judge their feelings. Especially for people who struggle with perfectionism, it is common to have predetermined ideas around how we ‘should’ feel in certain situations. The problem with this is that it halts us from experiencing life as it naturally occurs in the present moment. If we are constantly judging our feelings, we are not allowing ourselves to feel my feelings, and so the feelings just get buried deeper. I have found that feelings don’t go away until they are acknowledged. And if I judge my feelings, I stay stuck in them--they pester and persist! 

What helps me in these situations is to “follow the path of least resistance” or in other words, embrace my feelings, regardless of what I think of them, without fear. I always remind my clients that we have survived every emotion in your life up until this point and so we have evidence that our feelings alone can not harm us. So when I feel resistant, I practice consciously and intentionally feeling my feelings and embracing them in order for them to pass. Because that’s just the thing: all feelings pass in due time!

Something that helps me get in touch with my feelings (especially when my brain and body is doing everything possible to avoid them) is journaling or doing parts-based meditations. Internal family systems is a really interesting theory and type of therapy that speaks to allowing different parts of ourselves to shine through-even if they’re conflicting!