We’re All Struggling: How I Fight My Inner-Demons and Help Others
I have struggled with depression and anxiety most of my life. The constant ups and downs, the insecurities, the medication that doesn’t always work and comes with side effects. It’s unfair when my own brain turns against me and turns a happy time into a time where I feel as though I must fight for survival.
I also work in the mental health field and help people struggling just like myself. Battling my own inner-demons helps me understand the struggle my clients face each day, and makes me genuinely proud and excited for them when I watch them work to fight their own inner-demons. My personal struggles with my mental health don’t make me a weaker therapist, they help me understand the struggle of my clients on a deeper level. In a way, my struggles are giving purpose in the lives of others.
As a graduate student, I am still learning. I know intervention techniques, I am current on literature suggesting different ways to help clients, and I am excelling in my classes. So why don’t I just apply these things to myself and fix things? It just doesn’t seem to work that way. Imagine an expert magician watching a show: The expert is familiar with the tricks being performed, and even the ones that are new to him are based closely on ones he knows and, for lack of better words, the magic is lost.
I think mental health works in a similar fashion. When you are too close to the intervention models, you lose the magic. You have to find a way to mix things up and trick yourself. As a musician, when I struggled with a particularly rough passage, a teacher once suggested that I play it backwards or left-handed to get my brain to focus on something else while still working on the problem area. By mixing it up, I was able to achieve the results I needed.
To start making changes, I needed to mix up my approach to my own mental health. The most beneficial change I made was signing up for online counseling with BetterHelp. Much like playing music left-handed, online counseling gives me the opportunity to talk about the same emotions I would talk about in traditional counseling in a different way. A different area of the brain is activated when you write than is when you speak, and I am able to get more emotions and experiences out this way. Initially the feeling of anonymity drew me in, but now the relationship has grown and anonymity isn’t something I care about. Online counseling has been life-changing for me.
I’m a nerd, I don’t try to hide it. I constantly read studies and articles about things I am interested in: mental health, music, travel, etc. Another way I have mixed things up is by reading articles written by people going through similar experiences. I read with the mindset of wanting to expand my tools, not searching for the solution. The biggest thing I have learned is while what works for one person may not work for another, what works for one person one day may not work for the same person on a different day. For me, having different keys I can try when I’m not feeling my best, has kept me moving forward and opening the doors to the next experiences.
Like most people, I struggle to find time for myself during the day. I’m in graduate school, working at my internship site, writing, and on top of that I have a two-year-old who is very much a two-year-old. Time to myself is a luxury I don’t seem to have these days. My self-care was one of the first things I let slip in an effort to create more hours in the day for things I had to do. Without self-care, I struggled. All work and no play may make Jack a dull boy, but what about the effect it has on his mental health? What I learned as I started incorporating self-care back into my routine is that it doesn’t need to be time-consuming or a chore. My favorite form of self-care now is laughing at memes on my phone when I have a minute free. Something so simple and so small refreshes my brain and relieves my stress throughout the day.
I don’t measure my success by how many days I am anxiety and depression free, I am not a sign on a construction site bragging how many days since my last accident. Rather, I measure my success by how many times I fought back. The true “win” in the battle in my brain is preparing for the storm so I am able to face it with strength. It isn’t always about defeating depression and anxiety, sometimes it is just about weakening it and waiting it out.
