Mental Health Awareness Month: Using Our Imagination for Something More Than Psychobabble and Platitudes

This article talks about the limits of personal growth frameworks espoused by coaches and therapists and the healing power of the imagination. This article ends with one empowering action step you can take each week this month to define what is mentally healthy for you on your own terms.

Mental Health Awareness Month.? What are these months even for???

One part of my brain gets all curmudgeonly when I hear Mental Health Awareness.? “Oh no, get prepared for all the rules to live by that some folks are going to start shoving down your throat, Traci.”? Then I chuckle at myself.? I know that part of me speaking.? The church girl, who is about twelve, grew up going to church six days a week.? She helps manage authenticity and freedom.? I also appreciate she helps me keep an eye on the blind privilege, moralism, and elitism of the personal growth field. Because she can be triggered by personal growth, she gets a little strident in her language. I tell her “thank you” and come back to my Centered Adult as much as is possible in this moment.

It’s sunny outside here in Heidelberg.? I need to walk down the hill, through the vineyards (totally flexing), and get some soil and flowers for my planter boxes before I start working.? But the pull to “get productive” grabs me.? My heart starts to race.? My head starts to move really fast with lots of ideas.? Then I chuckle again.? I know that part of me too.? She is the girl who feels like productivity and achievement is power.? She is about five. Sitting still equates to sitting duck.? So best to stay productive because then you are "large and in charge".

Many of the tech founders, start-up executives, and VC’s I work with have some of this in their background.? She is the child in me that learned a bunch of survival strategies to stay safe in a family where my mother struggled with mental illness and had a new partner every two to three years.? I take a breath, put and hand on my chest, and speak calmly and reassuringly. I smile inwardly, and say “thank you” to this child and come back to my Centered Adult as much as is possible in this moment.

In breath.?

Out breath.?

Gazing out the window, while I sit here with you in this newsletter dialogue,? in the cool darkness of the morning. I ask myself “Traci how do you really want to be with yourself today or this week?? Minus all the psychobabble, but just from your heart?”

Lugging over my colorful box of markers, I pull out a clean white 5x7 card that I keep on the ready for random doodles. I made this list and wrote a note to myself.??

My colorful reminder card reads (scroll down if you want to see the finished product);

1. Listen to the birds (I am knocked over by birdsong and a glee takes over my whole body. Some people "aka my teenage sons" really think I am nuts how excited I get by birds.)
2. Color (I was in a women’s process art group for over 5 years while I was becoming a therapist.? I used to do a piece of art after each therapy session as a way to not “contain the session in my body” and to allow my unconscious creativity to burst forth.)
3. Read and I added to it, empower someone.? (I really appreciate when people tell me on LinkedIn my words mattered to them so I want to take in people’s good works and thoughtful posts and do the same.)
4. Free write (A friend challenged me yesterday to read fewer books right now.? She said, “Traci you are taking up the topic of power but sometimes rather than imposing someone else’s framework on your thinking, giving yourself space to process what you feel, think, believe without needing anything outside of yourself to sanction it.” It is good to have friends who are wise.)
5. Move (I have been a runner since I was 10.? What started out as trauma off steaming became holy.? I have a shirt that says “Running.? Cheaper than therapy.”? I mostly jog or walk now but always in the trees, the dirt, where I am sure to find myself going up a big hill, finding surprise birdsong, and being utterly entranced by the earth’s gifts.? You might even find me hugging an effing tree.? Yep, A California Tree Hugger.)

At the bottom of my 5x7 notecard I wrote this;

"Hi, sweetheart.? I know you get so excited by doing and achievement.? And I see all that you are beyond that.? Can we make space for more of you? To move from love rather than for love?"

Mental health is defined by you - not your therapist or coach.? I am so over others defining for you - or for me.? It took me a lot of training, a lot of therapy, and even now, practices that show me care in a regular ongoing way to honor what wholeness means to me and it is never a final steady state. Moreover, your definition is probably radically different than mine.? And that is ok.? But what I do as a therapist is help you remove the defenses that block you from fully knowing who you are.?

To be woefully reductionistic, psychological defenses were designed to achieve survival by adapting for two main things:

1. Safety
2. Connection

And yet much of the defensive maneuvering we learned to stay safe and connected when we were young creates its very opposite in adulthood.? Psychological defenses are not nuanced, can’t respond to complexity in our surround, and more often than not, are shaped by the civilizing forces of the culture around us that may not actually allow for our wholeness, authenticity, and self-liberation.?

But I am not about to give you some research.? Shout out what attachment style you are.? What survival strategy you use.? Or give you the rules for living well.

See my face to the left? Yeah, that is my face saying "I trust your smarts. Let's figure out what is true for you together!"

Why???

1. Those theories are helpful frameworks but they aren’t facts.
2. As a few fancy pants and famous neuroscientist friends of mine have said to me in private “there is a scientific bias that minimizes the wisdom of the human heart.”

As a supervisor said to me once “When you are a new therapist you quote theory all the time because it terrifies you to hold space with another human and not know what is happening.? As you age as a therapist you trust your heart, your feelings, and the frameworks and years of training are so alive in you operate on a more feeling and intuitive level.? You have arrived as? a therapist when you are comfortable not knowing and it usually takes about ten years.”??

When I supervise interns, I see in them what I see in so many less experienced therapists and coaches.? This desire to have efficacy and impact. They want to tout theory and interventions because they feel smart and good at their job.? But then the treatment is about “their efficacy” not the client’s wholeness and knowing.??

And as my analyst and I discussed two weeks ago (I take a lot of my clinical casework into my own analysis) and it is going to get woozy and deep so hold your hats…ready…?

He reflected back on what I was wrestling with in this way…

“We live in a psychologizing culture. But the terms like secure attachment are not better than the thing itself. Secure attachment doesn’t exist.? These “ideal things” are not real.? Psychologists want to butcher and sell the soul for their own selfish purposes.? When you use a term like “insecure attachment” it ends the conversation because there is no longer space for the imagination.”??

And so, what I wish for each of us this mental health awareness month is space to imagine how we would like to take care of ourselves and one another.?

• To imagine what mental health is.??
• To imagine what wholeness is.?
• Not to categorize all our faults and shortcomings.? But to dance with all the parts of ourselves, others, and the systems we live within so we can welcome MORE PARTS into the conversation.?

As we imagine with more and more conscious inclusion something very authentic and mentally healthy emerges.??

Ok, I get it.? You read this far and you still want an action item for mental health awareness month.? Fine.? If you need an action item, start each day or week with a notecard like mine.? Challenge your to-do list to start with care for self and others and to make space for the body, nature, art, human connection, and most of all imagination.? Then you can get to the phone calls, emails, profit and loss statements, your pitch deck, your branding strategy, your sales forecast, etc.?

Happy Mental Health Awareness Month! Off to tend my flower boxes.

Traci