Navigating subtle struggling
Your own medicine is often the bitterest one to take.
Whenever people come to me for advice about how to get out of a rut, I always tell them to be unafraid to seek help. I am a huge advocate for seeking the help you need for whatever issues you are going through, and I am very vocal about it.
It was only until recently, when I experienced a period of weather-induced physical symptoms that also went on to strongly affect my mental health, that I realized that I was not taking my own advice. I realized that although I had sought some psychological support during my initial recovery phase from an eating disorder, I really only did the bare minimum - I got myself out of the deepest rut, and went solo from there. I had never taken any substantial measures to maintain my mental health. I let myself dip into mini-relapses, or what I would call “subtle struggles”, and let myself reason my way out of seeking help for them. Importantly, I knew all of my triggers and was often very cognizant of when I would inevitably spiral into these small pockets of struggle, but there was just nothing I could do about it, at least not on my own.
It was kind of like drowning with my eyes open, with a lifeboat in plain sight somewhere in the distance, but telling myself that I would eventually find land without it, over and over. And I always did - just never as fast as I could have, if I had reached for the lifeboat.
A lot of it, admittedly, had to do with the fact that I was so proud of where I was at, most of the time. 60-70% of the time, I was mentally and physically thriving - doing the things I loved, living the life I was excited about. But then there was that 30-40% of the time when I dipped, sometimes harder than others. Each time, I told myself I would keep it all under control, and each time, I barely just did. I am a proud mental health advocate and psychology student - I know, probably more than most, how important it is to take care of one’s mental health. I am probably more aware of what symptoms are problematic, than would many individuals in the general population. This is a blessing and a curse - the blessing being my hyperawareness, and the curse being the pride that is associated with that hyperawareness. Oftentimes, I let myself slip because I thought I was capable of taking care of myself, when I should have been seeking higher levels of care.
Well, friends - today is as good as any day to change all of that.
After a few days of feeling physically beaten down and mentally worn out, I marched myself into the Student Wellness Center and sought a higher level of care for both nutritional and mental facets of my life.
Admittedly, this experience was very strange for me - this was the first time I had really visited a therapeutic setting since my initial recovery process, and having taken quite a number of classes on ways to treat patients, I experienced somewhat of an “out of body” experience. Several times I found myself analyzing the therapeutic techniques of the doctor, overthinking my answers and just not fully allowing myself to “be a patient”. But there was also a part of me that was starting to realize the truth of what I had learned in class in its real world application - particularly the principle that a major part of therapy is just having someone listen to you, acknowledge your symptoms like they’ve heard it before and reassure you that they’ll help you get to the bottom of it all.
I’m saying all of this as a reminder to myself, as well as to everyone who will hear me out:
You don’t have to be struggling hard to deserve therapy, or a higher level of mental health care.
As a patient and as a psychology major, I’m learning that subclinical symptoms matter. People rarely become depressed overnight - oftentimes, symptoms progress along a spectrum (Caley discusses this super well in her post, “Diagnostics: Scientific work in progress”), and exacerbate over time after many attempts to suppress and avoid them. Today, I stopped pushing the dust under a rug, and finally got myself a broom and a dustpan.
On a final note: It’s never too late, too weird or too anything to start taking measures to maintain or improve your mental health.
As a psych student and an aspiring psychologist, I thought it might be “weird” for me to assume the role of a patient. I think it’s useful here to remind myself that knowing about a mental health issue, or even knowing how to treat it doesn’t make you capable of healing yourself.
The therapeutic relationship is one of the biggest components of effective therapy - it is in this trusting relationship where you have someone reinforce concepts that you might very well already know, where you have someone (rather than just the empty void in your mind) to reverberate your thought processes, and where you have someone who can see more impartially into your unintentionally biased thoughts, that the magic happens. Trust therapy. Trust that there is value in taking larger strides towards improving your mental health, even if it does not suck very much at the moment. What so many of us, including myself, don’t realize is that optimal mental functioning is largely about maintenance and prevention, rather than waiting to save ourselves from the deepest, darkest pits.
Additionally, I am optimistic that walking my own talk - taking measures to sustain my mental health, whether or not I am currently in a rut or not - will prepare me to be a more compassionate therapist in the future. I’m excited to one day be able to play a role in someone’s life, whether it is pulling them out of the darkest cave they’ve ever been in, or just keeping them on the tightrope of life.