In my first post for #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek2019 I looked at dealing with being in denial. Wether that denial be of your physical health or your mental health, I am sure it is something we have all done. Tried to brush things off and say I’m fine. But what does saying fine really mean. To me now saying “fine” says a lot more that it means. To me when someone says they are fine it means they don’t know how to explain how they feel, or they don’t want to admit how they feel, or they don’t know how they feel. This happened just tonight speaking to a friend whose response to my how are you? was Im fine when clearly they were not.
I think we all just jump to I’m fine because we think it will not lead to anymore questions and we can move on to a different topic. Why do I think this? I used to be that person and still am sometimes. I would think if I said I was fine then I would be left alone to get on with things and could feel rubbish with out anybody pestering me. When I first started seeing a psychologist we spent a session talking about “Im fine” and why we use it. It was interesting to explore it further. It caused me a lot of pain as it brought up thoughts I didnt want to deal with, and made me realise my situation but now I look back and see I needed it otherwise I would still be telling people I am fine when I am falling apart.
Exploring the I’m fine became a lot more. It helped me accept my health. It helped me move out of a denial phase where I wanted to pretend to everyone I was ok. I didnt want to be the weak one who struggled to breathe or could work like everyone else. I didnt want a condition that can be considered by many as “just asthma” to rule my life and dictate it so if I didnt knowledge it to other people then everyone was happy as larry. All this did was hurt me more as no one else was getting more unwell or lonely because of my asthma and my health it was only me I was punishing.
Opening up and being able to explain how you feel is hard. I started off by trying to verbalise it but I found doing word clusters easier. I had 3 sheets of paper and each one contained a word: asthma, physically, and mentally. I also had coloured pens where I then wrote down how each word made me feel right there and then in one colour, in another colour I wrote down how i have felt in the past and then in a third colour I wrote down how I wanted to feel about the words.
This task made me accept my health both physically and mentally. It made me acknowledge that asthma is not just a physical condition but impacts you mentally as well. By treating each part in isolation I was never going to be able to really get to where I want to go. One each sheet of paper I had the same words particularly with where I wanted to be in the future. I had a common goal across everything and this is when I realised that to achieve that goal I need to look at every aspect of my health and how my condition is effecting me.
I found also that by doing this task I accept my health. I was able to see where I was and where I wanted to go. Rather than focusing on the here and now I was able to set goals for the future both short and long term. Goals which are achievable but also including some that are going to push me because you don’t want to make life too easy. Doing this meant I evaluated myself there and then, how I was feeling, what I needed to do to keep me stable or what I needed to do to change the situation I was in if it was a bad day. Accepting that you can have bad days is a big part of this but to accept bad days I found I need to have strategies on how to fix these bad days. It was not about looking for a fix such as a cure but looking at things that can still be done and achieved despite you not feeling well. For me a big part of not feeling well was feeling like I was failing. If I was not well enough to work or when i cut my hours cut down I found myself sitting at home thinking I should be at work just now but am not because of my lungs. Accepting that this is where I was at that point and doing something to change it even though I am not able to change my lungs I can change what my brain is doing. For me that is being involved in research. No matter how unwell I feel I will always be able to be involved in research.
One of the other big things about moving from denial to acceptance is evaluating yourself. You are going to have days where you slip back into the Im fine I don’t want to talk about things from time to time but if you can reflect back on why you felt like that. It might be that it was the people you were around you at the time and you did not want to share your feelings with them. This is ok. Everything has to be done in your own pace. Some people maybe able to reflect on themselves and feel they can shout from the rooftops about their condition and how it makes them feel where others cant tell a sole. Everyone is different and everyone has their own way of dealing with it.
I would be really interested to hear about how others found self acceptance of their health when they had previously been in denial about anything being wrong with them. I am always intrigued as to what skills others utilise to help them.
The above is just my experience. It might not be right for anyone else, but I found this is how I got my head around things and accepting how my asthma is impacting on life and how I felt about my asthma, the impact it has on my physical and mental health too.
One thing I want to get across this week is that a physical health condition is not isolated to just the physical body, and a mental health condition is not just associated with your mental state. They all over lap with each other and to truly get the best management for you everything needs to be looked at not just the condition in isolation.
