In a recent think-tank style meeting with Natasha that I was invited to listen in on, Natasha had a simple but profound comment. She said she doesn’t like to use the word “Healing” any more and prefers “Freedom from . . . “.
This hit home pretty quickly for me. I’ve often viewed the journey of overcoming my own mental health battles by being similar to overcoming a physical ailment. You want to “heal” what is broken and move on.
When I hit a wall (HARD) at the end of 2023, I could only explain the feeling to those close to me as “I just can’t live in my own head any more”. It felt like torture. I’ve talked to my Dr, Phychiatrists (3!) and Physchotherapists that are doing some great innovative work.
All I have been looking for is to “heal” and move on from what is in my head that I couldn’t live with any more. It wouldn’t be different if it were a hip, knee, back pain that had persisted without relief. I’d just want to to get it “healed” and move on.
The problem with the frequent analogy of dealing with mental health to physical ailments is that if you find healing from a physical ailment, your body can’t really just randomly “take you back” in the present to living with the pain and discomfort from which you healed from.
For mental health challenges to be “healed”, in a similar way your mind of today would never be able to truly take you back to the pain and discomfort from where you came.
The problem here is that with mental health challenges, it doesn’t take much to activate or trigger us to go “right back” to the pain as if it’s as fresh as day 1. For me, I think what drove the hitting the wall of not being able to live in my own head any more was that going “right back” again and feeling that I was not healing brought on more pain and dread than anything else. Natasha recently referred to a Portuguese term “Outra Vez” which means something like “I did this again??” when we get the feeling of being back to where we started.
When I think about a quest to find “Freedom” from what makes up the feeling of not being able to live in my own head, it’s a game changer. Freedom doesn’t mean there is “healing” like you’d find in a bad back or hip. Freedom means that what is there is there but I’m free from it chaining me down.
I don’t claim to be near “free” from what has driven me crazy about living in my own head for decades and continually bringing me back to “Outra Vez” moments.. . .but I do see a new kind of light in that pursuing a path to “free myself” from those things in the past may allow me to acknowledge them but to not let them define me and no longer let them be the persistent voice on my shoulder repeating things drilled into me so long ago.