Your mental health depends on…

Your mental health is not dependent on your circumstances. Your mental health is not dependent on your peers. Your mental health is not dependent on your weather. Your mental health is not dependent on your friends, even your best ones. Your mental health is not dependent on your man, your woman, your offspring, your parents or even your pastor.

Your mental health depends on you.

Want to enjoy a more consistent, mentally healthy state of mind?
Embrace more acute pain, my friend. Remember a good, dead German named Carl. Long ago he said, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Dr. Jung doesn’t sound very sympathetic for a shrink, huh…

Not to be outdone, America’s favorite shrink, Dr. M. Scott Peck, offered his sentiments a few years later. He too spoke ccd and far from empathetically…

“This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. Some of us go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid our problems and the suffering they cause, proceeding far afield from all that is clearly good and sensible in order to try to find an easy way out, building the most elaborate fantasies in which to live, sometimes to the total exclusion of reality.”

You and I’ve got problems. Our problem lies not in the fact that our lives are hard. All are. FACT. Our problem lies in our tendency to opt out of facing them. Problems are NOT self healing systems. Your problems don’t go away when you simply choose to look away. In fact, they do just the opposite – they grow. You have choices. Your choices have consequences. Your mental health is yours to own. Who knew that the root problem involved you owning your stuff? Who knew acute pain was the best route for your brain? Who knew you aren’t really in control?

Slow down and reflect on a problem that is occupying your mind. Think. Reflect. Write. Choose a productive action. Make it a painful one, my friend. The more acutely painful your choice the better it is for your brain.

Kinda hard to imagine but your mental health just took a turn for the positive…