
It’s not only people with advanced illnesses who benefit from mental health intervention, but also those coping with the unseen advancements of stress, burn out, anxiety and various forms of abuse or trauma. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)
Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.
Accessing mental health is considered a stigma, not only because we are afraid of what others will think of us, we fear being labelled with a ‘mental illness’ and looked down upon, but also because we judge ourselves. We assume that seeking help means we are ‘weak’ and ‘unable to cope’. We imagine it to be an admission of inadequacy. However, it’s also a host of cultural influences, the pressures we feel to be a certain kind of person or play a role, that keeps us dealing with pressures beyond our capacity.
As a result, we normalize living with a large amount of stress. This is unnecessary. Just as you wouldn’t deal with blood pressure spikes or migraines without medical intervention because you realise they can indicate an underlying health issue, mental health practitioners are also trained to deal with evidence-based techniques that help you cope with stresses adequately and also analyse if there is a deeper malaise that may need attention. So it’s not only people with advanced illnesses who benefit from mental health intervention but those coping with the unseen advancements of stress, burn out, anxiety and various forms of abuse or trauma.
1. Grief: a key unaddressed area in workplaces over the past few years has been grief. The passing of loved ones, friends, family, pets, has hit home hard, whether Covid-19 related or not. The grief has been compounded by a societal break down of what we considered ‘regular’ life, so it feels like we have been grappling with the emotions on our own, and without adequate help. So what, people around you may think, everyone has lost someone, why is your or my grief greater than anyone else’s? And besides, life must go on, we have to get back to work. The more the environment returns to ‘normal’ the more your grief gets buried within. The answer is that every relationship is unique and the way their death affects you is deeply personal to you, even if you can’t explain it. Further, everyone grieves at their own pace and in their own way. Bottling it up coming to terms with it or acknowledging and dealing with the pain can accelerate the impact of that repressed burden on body, mind and energy, depression through parameters such as motivation, joy, hope, optimism, drive and present in the ways we eat, live, socialize or withdraw. The impact may be felt even decades later. It is important to address grief deeply and therapeutically.
2. Overwork: Work can feel terrifyingly endless, burdensome, or fatiguing. This can be a complicated emotion because you also may feel relieved to have a raise, promotion, return to a work-from-office schedule and be retained at a time when many people are quitting or being laid off. So, neither do you want to ask for the workload to be reduced and nor are you able to work at maximum capacity, it is wearing you down. And the fear of not having a job is constantly nipping at your heels in both scenarios. If you have particular responsibilities at home like childcare, cooking, cleaning, taking care of elders, especially those entailing major expenses, these may be adding to the complicated balancing act you have to pull off. However, because you have a cultural belief that this is what one is supposed to do, you push the stress in and ‘get on with it’. This is the equivalent of pushing a ball under water. It will bounce back harder the moment you let go. In the meanwhile, you are using a major part of your strength to keep the ball under water.
3. Relationship issues: If you’re already coping with grief and/or are overworked, everyday battles between parents, in-laws, spouses, children and work colleagues can get on your nerves. These may be a cause of distress or they may be a spillover of existing anxiety within you that is getting projected onto others. Of course, they may also just be difficult people to cope with. But you may not be able to distinguish the best way to deal with them until you know how and where the issue is located. Perhaps you really are in a toxic work culture. Perhaps you’re overreacting? Therapy will help you figure that out.
4. Misalignment: Sometimes the workplace is great, the resources are there, people are supportive, the home environment is great but you are just not feeling the motivation to put in your all. You feel like running away. You don ‘t even like to get out of bed. You have trouble showing up. It could be warning signs of depression, but it could also be something else entirely. Perhaps you’re just not in the job that you want, perhaps suppressed grief, sorrow, ambition is catching up with you. Perhaps you are out of sync with your body. There are various reasons that could influence how and why you have a reluctance to show up. Therapy could help you with figuring the point of misalignment and working through that.
5. Abuse can exist in various forms. It may be outright physical assault causing bodily harm, physical bullying, roughhousing, or it can be insidious, an emotional abuse wreaked by perpetrators who manipulate positions of power. This can be in terms of name-calling, hurtful nicknames used without your consent that if you object to, you are labelled ‘overly sensitive’ or ‘emotional’, projects that never receive validation or praise no matter how hard you work, deliberately assigned bad seating, grunt work, tasks below your paygrade, being left out of team events, assigned work at the end of the day so you are invariably working late, poor work-life boundaries. Some of these maybe part of the work culture, organically formed ‘cliques’ in the workplace, but some may be caused by targeting you. You could lose sleep, have bodily manifestations of stress such as IBS, migraines, back aches. These can and do need to be addressed.
Therapeutic interventions help you figure out how to identify, categorise and handle situations of normalized stress and address them in a way that allows you to feel heard, safe and active, instead of being a passive victim to them in your life.
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