It’s Mental Health Awareness Month. I love that this is a thing. It’s something that is just recently normalized and talked about! Therapy and counseling and mental health used to be something “we just don’t talk about”.

The words Mental Health cover so many things. But for me personally, I’ve experienced anxiety and depression related to trauma. Trauma doesn’t have to be something crazy like most of us think. Our bodies can process something as traumatic that others might not consider trauma, so remember it’s just specific to your life and your experience.

It’s so easy to pick up things that are not ours to carry.

Especially in relationships.

If someone you love is having a bad day, it’s so easy to let that bleed over to our own day.

Being kind, loving, supportive, is amazing.

Picking up the other person’s bad day, and strapping it on, is another.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned in therapy is this- I can only work on ME. I’m the only one I can control or change. I can grow and heal and do the work to become the healthiest version of me. But I can’t do that for anyone else.

This was a little confusing to me in regards to my husband and children. I thought their decisions and actions reflected me. I can’t force my children to make good choices. I can teach them to have kind hearts and make good decisions, even better I can model that for them. I can love and support my husband but I can’t change him. (Obviously I can take things away from my kids and force them to “obey”, but i’m more concerned with their hearts and why they make decisions”.

“The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.”

-Ernest Hemingway

“Recovery does not mean immunity or exemption from problems; recovery means learning to face and solve problems, knowing they will appear regularly.”

-The Language of Letting Go

In March of 2018 I went to a place called Onsite. I call it adult therapy camp. It’s right outside of Nashville on a beautiful piece of land. I stayed in the beautiful mansion built in the 1800’s that is the centerpiece of the property. There were about 50 people there that week, and we were broken into groups of 8 or 9. Each group was assigned a therapist, and they told us about 6 months of therapy happens during the course of a week there. It was amazing and hard and excruciating and life changing and beautiful all at once. 

I wanted to share a few things that have really helped me in my overall wellness the past two years. My motivation behind this website is to create a space that helps people feel and live better. 

I believe mental and emotional and physical health are all closely tied. I also believe our bodies talk to us about how we are doing in all of those areas.

Honestly- I ignored some things my body was trying to tell me for too long. I lived with some stress symptoms that were trying to tell me I needed to make some changes. I didn’t listen for a long time and had to really do some work to recover. My therapist calls it “cues”.

I’m an enneagram 9. If you haven’t heard about the enneagram there are about 1000 websites now devoted to the study of it. And If you don’t know you’re number, look up a quiz to find out what number you are. I like the Enneagram Institute.

9’s are peacemakers. That’s our thing. We don’t like anything to disrupt our peace and harmony, and that can mean avoiding things that are unpleasant. That’s me.

My husband and I have started sending each other short gratitude lists in the morning. If I’m working at the gym, it makes me smile to see his list pop up on my phone. It’s easy, you type the first things that come to mind. The more specific you are, the better. It’s easier to be vague and general- more challenging that you might think to be detailed and specific. But it make a big difference. And it sets my perspective for the day.