Why We Suffer

Today, I want to talk a little bit about the stigma around mental health, and why it's immensely important to take care of ourselves from the inside out.

People often say: “Oh, I don’t need therapy, I don’t have some mental illness.”

But, essentially, what it comes down to is that we all have feelings. Every single one of us. That’s the core foundation of our lives, we feel things. If we don’t have the skills to deal with those feelings, it manifests in a variety of ways. Just because you think you’re not bipolar, or depressed, or that you don’t need help, it doesn’t mean that you actually know what to do with your feelings.

Unfortunately, we all have unhealthy, dysfunctional ways of dealing with feelings. Most of us are staring at a screen, and that’s a big avoidance behavior. Another unhealthy way of dealing with feelings is self-medication.

When was the last time you put your screen down, and you just hung out with you, and you were okay, and you were comfortable in your own skin? The distractions of screens, the eating, the drinking, the shopping, all this overindulgence that we do, that keeps us from being with ourselves, essentially messes with us.

If we take away that stigma around mental illness, and we realize that all of us need to take care of ourselves from the inside out, that we don’t just naturally wake up happy, and that we need to do the exercise to be able to feel that way, then therapy really feels like a valuable and necessary investment that we have to make in ourselves.