Once upon a time, I was largely oblivious to negative things in my life that I needed to deal with. I unknowingly let myself be carried by negative feelings and thoughts, without really reflecting on how they affected my mental health, and how my handling of them worked (or didn't work, rather).
Then followed a time of relative happiness, during which my chief coping strategy was characterised by an aggressive, unguided optimism--forcing myself to see the bright side of everything, always expecting the best--and a compulsion to dismiss my negative reactions as unjustified, unworthy, and unconstructive. During this time, I expected myself to be able to shake off--or sweep under the mat--pretty much any negative feeling with ease and haste.
Sometime after I'd perfected this art of wilful blindness (!!) a close friend convinced me that my strategy was a thoroughly flawed one, as it lacked the elements of acceptance and reflection that are crucial to any reasonable, constructive processing effort. I couldn't deny that, and realised that the approach I believed to be ideal for myself was vastly different from that which I believed was ideal
for everyone else.
Striving for personal development (and in the name of consistency!), I decided to change my coping strategy to incorporate reflection on--and acceptance of--my negative thoughts and feelings.
As is so common in life, something went wrong, and I eventually found myself at an extreme where I heedlessly accepted almost all my negative reactions to almost everything as being justified and okay... but couldn't go on from that point to
do anything about them in terms of coping, nor in terms of resolving the problems that caused them.
Slowly but surely, my optimism was replaced by pessimism and cynicism. And, untempered by my once strong optimism, my reflection--my obsessive wandering in my inner world of thoughts and feelings and emotions--quickly led me into one of those vicious cycles that can so easily cause and maintain a depression.
It's only recently that I've come out of that (sort of), and now--armed with experience and knowledge
--I'm hard at work finding for myself a new strategy (or several new ones). One that will be more balanced, more constructive, more reliable. We'll see how it goes (look me up in five years
).
This long (though simplified) account wasn't intended as a blog post, but as a prelude to my question to you:
how do you deal, and how have your strategies for coping developed throughout your life?And just so we're clear: I'm posting this out of curiosity about how other people do things, not as some sort of "Help Aimy Fix His Life" workshop.
It's my hope that this will be a
useful exercise in navel-gazing
yeah
While discussing this on other forums, I came to think of something else. When it comes to somatic health issues, I think the vast majority of us can appreciate the benefits of being able to deal with the root problem directly, rather than only treating symptoms (or just ignoring the whole thing). Is it inappropriate to have a similar attitude towards mental health issues? I ask this only because that seems to be a view held by many people I've encountered (most of which are men, I think), although it is rarely explicitly stated.