I Am Healing by Accepting I Will Never Be "Cured"

I have depressive and anxious thoughts, I always will, and that is okay. I spent four years in therapy trying desperately to cure myself. Over and over again I felt I failed. Depressive and anxious thoughts reappeared, and my brain tallied all the ways I could’ve stopped it. If only I’d run every morning, meditated every night, if only I volunteered more regularly, spent more time with friends, ate cleaner, practiced yoga, wrote more often, and on and on and on. I convinced myself I must be inherently broken, different. Maybe I needed medication, maybe I needed to live by a river with a garden and never work again. I believed healing meant never experiencing another anxious or depressive thought. “Normal” people didn’t have these thoughts? And the goal was to be normal, right? So, I attempted to exhume that bad part of myself. I put up red tape with the words “BROKEN. DO NOT ENTER” and whenever my brain crossed the tape I berated and belittled myself. Why can’t I just be normal?

One in five U.S. adults live with a “mental illness” according to the National Institute of Health. One in five or 52.9 million people. And I argue the number is actually larger (think of the uncle who definitely has issues, but would never admit it to anyone, let alone a government organization). Of all the people you see today at least 1/5th experience mental health struggles. For reference, one in twenty people are natural blondes. I don’t know about you, but when I see a natural blonde, I don’t think that is ABNORMAL. So, if a massive quantity of Americans lives with mental health struggles, why do I feel like an abnormal freak when I’m not okay? Don’t worry, I’ve got theories.

In our society, we typically talk about mental health struggles from a clinical perspective or a recovered perspective. A lot of rhetoric around mental health comes from therapists and psychologists, researching and observing. This is important work, and research/observation cannot fully represent lived experience. We might learn a certain therapy method led to improvement, but what does improvement mean? What does it feel like? What does the improved person think? How does the improved person feel six months after the experiment? Two years? Are they improved the rest of their lives? These are questions left unanswered from Quantitative research (the primary form of research in most Social Sciences). The other perspective we frequently hear is “I was completely depressed, down in a hole, low as can be, and then I found ~ insert any activity, ideology, or medication found to be beneficial to humans here”. Why do we love these stories so damn much? Because they say to us, it will never be hard like this again if only you try this solution. The appeal is massive and our sweet little monkey brains salivate for simple solutions. We hate the reality of complexity, paradox, and continual work being human requires. We prefer the “try this and it will end”, over the “try this and it will help, but you’ll still struggle and need to adjust to your changing environment and needs many times throughout your life”. I get it, the Sisyphus-like climb of life is difficult to accept, but the alternative of being enraged at yourself each time the rock rolls on down the hill is not easier.

The dominant mental-illness treatment model also molds the belief in brokenness when we experience ongoing struggle. Currently, we treat mental health like we treat physical health – assess, diagnose, medicate/treat, cure. This is a ginormous improvement from treating mental health by shoving people in asylums, labeling them deranged or possessed, and then abusing them for the rest of their lives. However, there’s a big pitfall in that the brain is the most complex organ in the body. And we still largely don’t understand it. Labeling certain functions of the brain “dysfunctional” or labeling certain minds “ill” is far more nuanced than labeling a leg broken or not. The brain is impacted by environment, upbringing, cultural belief systems, daily stressors, trauma, socialization, media, community, etc. all at once, all the time. In all circumstances, with all of this information, the brain tries to protect us. Sometimes the brain gets it wrong (usually) because at some point in the past that response was right. If a child comes from an abusive home where hypervigilance is rewarded by minimizing or protecting them from violence, when they go to school the brain will continue to be hypervigilant because it wants to protect them. The child may be distracted by every noise, every movement, every interaction, and unable to focus on the lesson. Our current mental health model often labels this behavior dysfunctional, diagnoses the child with ADHD or behavioral problems, and medicates them, completely ignoring how functional this behavior actually is within a dysfunctional environment, and doing little to address the environmental problems.

Most people engage in the dysfunctional environments of Social Media and the News. If you engage with either or both of these mediums your brain likely takes in traumatic news and conflict in copious quantities daily. The comments sections on Instagram provide the same amount of vitriol and emotional violence most people experience offline in a year. The News offers more trauma in a month than most people experience first-hand in their lifetimes. But our brains want to protect us, so they may (especially sensitized brains like mine) treat these events as if they happened directly to you, causing immense burden to our stress response systems. In addition to media, mental health is impacted by the family of origin, overwork, poverty, trauma, racism, sexism, lack of social connection, amongst many others. Yet, in our current treatment model for mental health, surrounding factors are often ignored or minimized, and we opt to label people as ill instead. They’re marked as broken. Not their past, not the chaotic world, not the expectations on them, not their trauma. They are mentally ill and if they just take enough medication, they will be okay enough to ignore everything else and be a good productive member of society. (I am not anti-medication, it can be an amazing tool, but I don’t believe it is a complete solution if extraneous factors are not addressed as well).

My brain is extra sensitive. I moved at 14 and lost my social support system. Isolated and friendless, I blamed myself for not being cool enough for people to like me. I dated to curb my loneliness, but when you date to fill a void, you will lower your standards and tolerate poor treatment. This culminated with an on & off three-year-long emotionally and verbally abusive relationship from age 17-20. Self-hatred led to eating disorders and suicidal thoughts too. I experienced additional trauma from the death of a friend and an uncle. My brain came to believe the world to be a bad, unsafe place. My brain came to believe I needed to be perfect to be loved. My brain came to believe I needed to hide my emotions and feel them alone. My brain came to believe I was alone. My brain came to believe all these harmful things because it wanted to keep me safe, so it created an explanation of the world based on my hard experiences. Now I am 24 with a Psychology degree and four years of therapy. I am married to a kind, patient man. I have a home and a sweet puppy. I rebuilt my social support. My family and I are closer than ever. And sometimes these beliefs still surface. Sometimes my brain convinces me the world is unsafe, and I am alone. My brain comes up with really great evidence: wars, shootings, political turmoil and regression, death and sickness of loved ones, hard days at work or school, mistakes in relationships. But believing I am broken or ill because my brain causes struggle while trying to keep me safe, doesn’t heal me or make the thoughts vanish.

My brain is shaped by the life I’ve lived, by its personal proclivities, by the world I live in and the events that take place within it. Sometimes I do not need to believe the thoughts in my head, but I won’t believe having those thoughts means I am ill. There are days I must be gentle and nurturing to myself and I must enforce strict boundaries around my time and energies. Those days will continue to come, though hopefully my recovery time will shorten. When people lose rights or terrible things occur and my brain screams, “The world is not safe!” I will work to find safety within my life again, while honoring my brain’s sensitivity to cruel realities, actions, or policies. Exercise, yoga, meditation, connection, spirituality, cardio, nature, all improves my well-being, but they will not “fix” me. No matter how rich in goodness my life becomes, my brain will sometimes try to protect me in ways that no longer work. This world can be a hard place to exist, and my brain is doing the best it can with what it knows, so are everyone else’s brains. There are many broken things in this world, which value money over people, but we are not broken for struggling within it. I am trying to give myself the love and grace to radically accept my paradoxical, complicated, sometimes painful, complete humanity. I hope by writing this, someone else feels they can accept their humanity too.