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Mental health is the ability to be fully present with life even in situations that are emotionally intense, and to come back to a place of balance once a situation or crisis has been resolved, or to reclaim this balance in order to resolve the crisis/situation.
What does this look like in daily life? It means being able to express yourself with a full range of emotions. It means being able to “tune-in” to those emotions and let them inform your understanding of yourself and the situation you are in. It means not getting stuck in extremes of emotions— very high highs and very low lows. It means to be able to “flow” with the situations we encounter in life and to learn and grow in our understanding of ourselves and others because of it. It means adapting to life.
Sometimes we become so overwhelmed with events and their emotional impact that we become rigid in our response. We close up, become very narrow in our experience of things; this is a good sign that we have lost balance. In a crisis this is normal, but if this narrowness becomes our habitual way of coping we can become stuck. So instead of having a full range of emotion, we experience— and are limited to— a narrow, rigid state. This can lead to feelings associated with depression, anxiety, panic, fear. These become the primary emotions we experience. This is a state of “dis-ease”.
Sometimes this can be caused by Genetics, Biology or Traumatic Events. Sometimes, and most often it is a combination of all of these. When this happens we work in a holistic manner to help people recover their balance, their ability to flow. We can do this using counseling and in some cases medication, but most often through a combination of the two.
