In recent years society has been taking mental health more seriously, and one thing we are discovering is that positive change is easier than we thought. Although support can be patchy and largely privately provided, mental healing is possible.
For hundreds of years the model of physical healing has been the patient, doctor relationship. The patient has the problem, and the doctor has the solution. There is little responsibility taken by the patient, the doctor simply provides the remedy. If the patient undergoes the doctor’s surgery or takes the doctor’s pills, then they get better. But the emerging model of mental healing is slightly different. Even when you are under the care of a psychiatrist, who is a doctor, and can use medicines, you are invited to explore your own mental maps and behaviours in a collaborative endeavour to redraw these maps and to discover new behaviours. This isn’t always comfortable. You are asked to be honest, especially with yourself, and a mirror is held up, so that the psyche can see itself for what it is. Difficult, perhaps, but at the same time by taking responsibility it is liberating. You are asked to consider who you really want to be now and in the future. You can release negative emotions from the past, you can change limiting beliefs that you have carried for years into something much more positive and empowering. Recently, I read Professor David Nutt’s book Psychedelics, about cutting-edge research using psychedelics to help heal untreatable anxiety disorders, PTSD, and depression, with trial success rates of over 80-90%. Even with these treatments the same mental exploration is undertaken, and the patient still needs to take responsibility for their life. But this could mean that in the future more of the psychiatrist’s medicines will be plant based, and many more people will be able to slay their mental demons.
Whether you have medicines or talk therapies or both, you now feel new, and the new you must go back and face the life that the old you was leading before, and remodel it. This often means doing new behaviours and enforcing newly drawn boundaries. Although the new you can do these things now, and wants to, the old behaviours and boundaries are familiar and comfortable. So how do we sustain the changes that we made whilst sat on the comfortable sofa with our therapist or coach? There are two simple rules, you must focus on what you want and take action. How do you get a donkey to move? You can hit it with a stick or offer it a carrot. If we are close to getting hit with a stick, then the pain we imagine as a result is often a stronger motivating factor, right now, than the idea of eventually getting a nice juicy carrot. If we are close to what we do not want in life, then moving away from it will get us going. But as we move away from it, it ceases to have the same motivational effect on us to keep on moving. We take fewer positive actions, most often slowly sliding back into what we don’t want, only to then start moving away from it again. This does not sustain our progress and uses negativity to motivate us, which is stressful. It is much better to focus on what we want to sustain our motivation. By thinking about what we want, we use positive states for motivation, which means our motivation will be consistent. Focusing on what you want means having goals. These need to be short, medium, and long term, and as you think about them you should feel motivated. If they don’t provide any motivation, then you need to change them. Because it is the motivation and excitement that your goals produce that will inspire you to take action and to keep on taking action in life. For long term goals, imagine the sort of person that you want to be, and think about what makes you feel the happiest. Then work back from that idea to set medium term milestones and short-term action-based objectives.
As you move forward, you must understand that you will be faced with new challenges. You are entering new territory, and may be carrying limiting beliefs about yourself which were never previously an issue, but now are. Inevitably, your progress will not be a straight line upwards, but the cumulative effect of focusing on what you want and taking action will be. Wherever you are in your life now, by taking action today your mental and physical world can be better tomorrow.
“Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease.” Hippocrates
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