Tag: Mental Health Counseling

Coping With Covid

by Nathan Chua

It is hard to imagine how all of us have suffered through this pandemic for so long.  None of us, except for a few elite scientists, could have known that this would happen in our lifetime.  This situation has probably sent you through a whole gamut of difficult thoughts and feelings.  From struggles with anxiety, fear, frustration, anger, relationships, boredom, and more; they are all understandable in these times.  

Some of us may be saying, look what Covid has done to me?  I’ve become more irritable, less tolerant, depressed, anxious, angry, and many more.  You are not alone.  You share these thoughts and feelings with anyone who has had a brush with all that this pandemic has been inflicting on us for over a year now.

The key here is to know what is within or outside our control.  With difficult situations come difficult thoughts and emotions, and sometimes it could be difficult relationships as well.  Unfortunately, it is often that we find ourselves judging all of these as unwanted, unnecessary, and even harmful to us.  We can’t be blamed for having these judgmental thoughts.  In today’s “success equals feel good and happy” society, there is really nothing much that can explain why we feel miserable, except that there’s probably something wrong with us.  We are defective in some ways compared to others.  They all seem well put together and coping well in spite of everything.  

You and I have minds that are quick to judge ourselves especially when times are rough.  This is the hardware that we come with.  The depression comes when we buy into the idea that we have something to do with the quality of our thoughts.  We measure our sanity against the seemingly pristine and peaceful minds we see in TV ads, social media, and the gigantic, right on top of us, billboards.  Eventually we discover how futile our attempts to suppress unwanted thoughts are, and begin to have a sense of powerlessness and of being ineffectual.  We fight with the constant murmurs of our minds and get caught up in this struggle.  Here’s the secret sauce, “Give it up!”  It doesn’t matter how many pills or distracting activities we do, let’s come to an acceptance that our minds are simply wired that way.  Next thing we do?    

Commit to doing things that tally well with what we want to do with our limited time on this planet, and more so, with our short, precious moments with those who matter to us.  Take these thoughts and feelings and bring them for the ride of our choosing.  Come back to what truly matters to us with all the unwanted chatter!  Be present with our kids even if our minds continue to remind us of that upcoming mortgage payment.  Be kind and loving even as we feel frustrated with how people around the house are acting.  Act calmly even if we aren’t feeling calm.  We can do it if we are willing to do the hard work, because in the end, it only matters what we have done, not what thoughts and feelings we struggled with in our heads.   

How language can affect your mental health

by Nathan Chua

Ah, the functions of language!  Until recent years, I have never thought about how language played a role in our ability to sustain our mental health.  As the theory behind this new approach that I am using is framed upon language and how we use it, I would like to introduce you to a few terms that we use in a way that can cause us to experience unnecessary depression, excess anxiety, and even attempts at suicide!

The first expression we use quite a lot in the field of counseling is the word, “healing.”  I remember in the years I spent in graduate school, this word was used quite liberally.  In fact, there was even a book that had, as part of its title, the words, “wounded healer.”  Healing though connotes the idea that we are somehow broken and that we need to be put together like a puzzle or a broken vase in a clinical setting.  

Reality though would tell us that this can be nothing more than a figure of speech that at the least, could be considered unhelpful.  Because nothing inside of us is really broken.  It is rather a form of learning to resort to certain strategies that provide instant relief from emotional pain that end up unproductive and futile; and thereby rendering us feeling more ineffectual and deserving of our sad fate.  We are whole and complete.  What we suffer when we are said to be having some psychological problems is that of being stuck in a pattern of behaviors that do not serve our best interests.

The next phrase or term I have learned to be used in unhelpful fashions is the idea that comes from stories of people who supposedly went from being dead to surviving a coma. It is often said that they see a great white light and felt immense peace!  Attempts at suicide are basically logical responses to removing the difficult feelings brought on by our attempts at living what comes as meaningful to us.  It is better to die, since one:  it will remove the painful emotions we experience from our pursuits for meaning and purpose, and two:  there will be unimaginable bliss thereafter.  Unfortunately, allow me to paraphrase an expert in behavioral analysis who said in jest that there has so far been no one on record to have answered a survey from death that talks about how much better it is on that side.

The last term for this post is the word, confidence.  We often combine this with the word, “feel.”  This means that confidence is a feeling that we need to achieve in order to do something of significance.  As Dr. Steven Hayes likes to use etymologies in his work, the word actually means having full trust or faith in Latin.  We have somehow in our modern usage of the term used it to mean that it is something we feel rather than something we do.  We can still put our full faith in ourselves even as we feel anxious about doing a certain task. 

Remember that the best way to live is to focus on what we do rather than what we feel, because there is the possibility of redemption in the former.  Our feelings are subject to change and outside of our control.  If we hang our hats on them, we will find ourselves stuck in a cycle of frustration, and eventually see ourselves as broken vessels that need to be pieced together, or brought to a place where we choose to end it all permanently for temporary relief from the varied emotions we experience that come with truly living.