If you are currently suffering, this book may not have spoken to you much except between the lines. It isn’t a great help to be told that you are human and that you must deal with it. If you are in unyielding circumstances, it isn’t wonderful to hear that your circumstances matter. It isn’t much of a relief to learn that the first step of your journey is from “the mental disorder of depression” to ordinary despair or from “the mental illness of schizophrenia” to a complicated reality that includes the straightjacket of your formed personality and experiences, such as hearing voices. What have I really offered you?
I would say that I have offered you an opening. My offer is that you leave a table set with a feast of false views of your reality and second-rate answers to your challenges and decide, despite the overwhelming constraints put on you by your formed ways of being, to plot your own course. I would ask you to articulate your values and your principles and live a life full of purpose with a fiendish new talent for making personal meaning. Popping a pill no doubt sounds easier; that is your choice. The door I am inviting you to open leads through a gauntlet of cold water to a vast expanse of reality.
The problem you face is being human. If the problem really was some biological malfunction, that would be one thing. But it isn’t. The problem is your personality; the problem is the causal chain that is your history; the problem is your circumstances; the problem is the way your pain manifests; the problem is the world as it is; the problem is your reality. It is a problem that never ends and is never resolved. Who are we trying to kid by not facing our destiny? There are evolutionary reasons for widespread denial, but even if that denial helps the species as a whole, it is unlikely that it helps you very much—not if you are suffering.
The instant we pat ourselves on the back that we have resolved one thing or made one thing better—finally created meaningful work, say, or had the great luck of meeting someone to love—then a cloud passes over the sun and we remember how many children are starving or how we will cease to exist in the blink of an eye or how much trouble we are having trying to quit smoking. Let us stop trying to live pain-free and live proudly instead. Our true goal is to try to reduce all the emotional distress that we can possibly reduce while at the same time sighing at the inevitable return of some portion of it.
If you are chronically poor, chronically in physical pain, chronically sad, chronically unable to realize your dreams, chronically unable to experience life as meaningful, that is really too much. Yet somehow you must soldier through life, even if you would really just as soon not bother. There is no good answer to this—a million beers are not the answer; voodoo is not the answer; shopping is not the answer; rage is not the answer. While there is no good answer, there is nevertheless a best answer. That is the way of pride, power, purpose, and inner peace that begins with a deep acceptance of the nature of being human.
Our personality forms around many irritants, and we become not a pearl but a person. We cultivate our hatreds, resentments, and revenge fantasies. We get hooked on potato chips, sales, saints, violence, soap operas, adrenalin, comic books, gold faucets, our appearance—hung up on some meat hook with our feet dangling above the ground, much of our freedom unavailable to us. We flail there, stubbornly unwilling or sadly unable to create the powerful manifesto for living that might begin to relieve a portion of our suffering. If you have read this far, isn’t it time for you to create such a manifesto? Isn’t it time to announce exactly how you intend to live, in pain perhaps but nonetheless proudly?
What might such a manifesto sound like? Here’s one:
“My life is my project. Therefore I make certain efforts. I make these efforts according to my life purpose choices and in alignment with my values and principles. This is the high ideal I set for myself. As many times as I fall short of this ideal, that many times do I get back on my feet and return to my commitment. If I am plagued by thoughts that don’t serve me, I work to get a grip on my mind. If I am plagued by behaviors that don’t serve me, I work to extinguish them. If there is a deep sore spot in me, I work to heal it. If there is a wild, crazed place in me, I work to tame it.
“I know that I may have to change my circumstances, upgrade my personality, revise my worldview, seize new meaning opportunities, create new links in my causal chain, reach out for warmth and support, and much more. I will work to do all this. Unless there is some biological proof to the contrary—and I want to not only see that proof but also to be convinced by it—I do not accept that I have any sort of ‘mental disorder or disease.’ I may have anguish, terrors, rages, and more—but all of that is different from mental disease. I may even fall into some horrible holes out of which I can barely climb, but even then—even then—my life is my project. My pain is real, but so is my job of being human.”
However you define your afflictions—as ADHD, PTSD, or OCD, as God’s curse or the universe’s indifference, as a bad draw or a failed effort—there is nothing except resistance that prevents you from creating your manifesto for living, living it, and seeing if some portion of your suffering vanishes as a result. To repeat, the mental health establishment has chemicals with effects to offer you, and you may want those effects. If a chemical “stabilizes your mood,” “quells your anxiety,” or “silences your voices,” you may want those effects. But do not suppose for a minute that your job is done. You still have your manifesto to create and the project of your life to oversee.
However your society conceptualizes mental health and whatever it offers or refuses to offer by way of mental health services, you are obliged to separate yourself from its version and its vision. Can you do that? Can you dispute the contention of your tribal shaman that you are plagued by evil spirits if that is the village in which you grew up? Can you dispute the contention of your church elders that you are possessed by demons if that is the church in which you grew up? Can you dispute the contention of your psychiatrist that you have “clinical depression” if you grew up in a world revering doctors and medicine? The stakes are very high for you. If you can’t, you may find yourself relying only on potions, exorcisms, or chemicals and not on yourself.
Because you are embedded in society, the future of your mental health is partly a function of how your society conceptualizes and deals with “mental health issues.” If you would like to exert influence there and point your society in the direction you would like it to go, then that sort of activism and advocacy might well become one of your life purposes and meaning opportunities. I hope you see the matter exactly that way: I hope that you see the value in participating in the future of the mental health of our species. Your activism and advocacy are needed.
At the same time, you must look in the mirror. What do you want? Do you actually want to reduce your distress if that means that you must make changes? Do you want to stand up and make yourself proud by your efforts? I hope so. Then you are setting yourself real work. You will have to roll up your sleeves. Here comes a stale complaint that you have complained about a million times before. It needs banishing. Here comes anxiety rising up from some very deep place. It needs quelling. Here comes a spider’s web of clever thoughts leading to apathy. It needs dismissing. Here comes a horrible memory. How will you survive it? Here comes a torrent of sadness. What will you do? These are your tasks. This is living.
Maybe you are one of the lucky ones who is not suffering that much, who has made peace with the indifference of the universe, who has found some work to love and some people to love, who finds life more fascinating than dreadful, who has a roof over your head and some treats in the cupboard and who can regularly laugh. Good for you! But I fear that I have some difficult news for you, too: please help others. Especially help the children. Our conception of the relationship between parent and child has changed over the millennia. If we have happily and luckily moved from a vision of children as chattel and farmhands, we have nevertheless slid into an odd new place of viewing them as proto-patients whose every behavior is a possible symptom of some mental disorder. If you are feeling pretty good, put your foot down for the children.
If you aren’t feeling pretty good, there is no short answer as to what you might try, since the problem is life. It would be ridiculous to reduce the answers you need to items on a tip sheet. On the other hand, tips—like the tactics at the disposal of a human experience specialist—are not to be scorned completely. Here are a dozen that I think are worth your attention.
Twelve “mental health” tips:
1. Accept being human
Human beings experience emotional distress in all sorts of ways: sadness, anxiety, addictions, unproductive obsessions, unwanted compulsions, repetitive self-sabotaging behaviors, physical ailments, conflicts of conscience, despair, boredom, and as all sorts of angry, bleak, and agitated moods. Can you accept this? Can you accept being human? When distress returns, can you stand unsurprised and, instead of blaming the universe, shrinking from the moment, or throwing up your hands, say, “I am a human being. I am nothing but human. Now, let me do what I can to gather myself and make myself proud!”
2. Acknowledge the straightjacket of personality
Our personality is at once a pressure cooker and a windowless room. It sends our mind racing, it builds up grievances, it chooses sides, it frightens itself, it experiences disappointment and loss, it maintains dark secrets, it gets violently aggrieved, it wants what it wants, and it knows how to hate at least as well as it knows how to love. Yet what it does and how it operates seem not to interest its owner. It is as if we are born with one genetic instruction before all others: “Never look in the mirror!” Your personality is your responsibility; your personality is your destiny. It may prove a terribly tight fit; only you can improve it.
3. Be yourself
You must improve yourself—but you must also be yourself. This means asking for what you want, setting boundaries, having your own beliefs and opinions, standing up for your values, wearing the clothes you want to wear, eating the food you want to eat, saying the things you want to say, and in countless other ways being you and not somebody small or false. This doesn’t mean denying the importance of others—of individuals, communities, civil society, and so on. Rather, it means that if you are gay, you are gay; if you are smart, you are smart; if you demand freedom, you demand freedom. Make use of your available personality to untwist the straps of your formed personality and be the person you intend to be.
4. Invent yourself
You come with attributes, capacities, and proclivities, and you are molded in a certain environment. Your personality forms, and you become repetitive to a fault. But at some point you must say, “Okay, whatever is original to me—whether it’s an extra dose of sadness, a bit too much sensitivity, whatever—and however I’ve been formed—to shrink, to fantasize, whatever—now who do I want to be?” You reduce your emotional distress by deciding to become a person who will experience less emotional distress: a calmer person, a less critical person, a less egoistic person, a more productive person, a less self-abusive person, and so on. You make the clear, conscious decision that, even as tightly wound as you find yourself, you will make use of your available personality and your remaining freedom to create yourself in your own best image.
5. Love and be loved
Part of our nature requires solitude, alone time, and a substantial rugged individualism. But this isn’t the whole story of our nature. We feel happier, warmer, and just much better, we live longer, and we experience life as more meaningful if we love and let ourselves be loved. We must be individuals, but we must also relate. To do both, to be ourselves and to relate, requires that we acknowledge the reality of others, that we not only speak but also listen, and that we make ourselves fit for relationships by eliminating our worst faults and growing up. If you have trouble loving, if you withhold, if you give yourself away, if you lead with criticism, if you can’t get over yourself—whatever you do that harms your chances at love, remedying that ought to become one of your life purposes.
Nothing causes more emotional distress than the thoughts we think. We must do a better job than we usually do of identifying the thoughts that don’t serve us, disputing them, demanding that they go away, and then substituting more useful thoughts. Thinking thoughts that do not serve you is the equivalent of serving yourself up emotional distress. Only you can get a grip on your own mind; if you won’t do that work, you will live in distress. Think you are ruined? That thought will ruin you. Think you are unworthy? That thought will diminish you. Think the world is a cheat? That thought will disempower you. Your distress is not only held in firm place by the thoughts that you think, but it also is those thoughts. Imagine a day without inner commentary about everything that is hard, everything that is scary, and everything that is wrong. Wouldn’t that be a better day?
7. Heal the past
We are not so completely in control of our mind, our emotions, or our being that we can prevent past sore points and the residue of trauma from returning with a vengeance. They have a way of pestering us as anxious sweats, as nightmares, as sudden sadness, and as waves of anger or defeat. They remain not only as memory, but as personality as well, woven into our fabric. But we can nevertheless try to heal the past by thinking through how we want to relate to the deep memories that are now woven into our fiber. What will you do when you are struck by a flashback? What tactics will you employ when you well up with rage or regret? From what reserve will you call up the energy to move through the pain? If healing is necessary then you must have tactics for healing, just as we need tactics to deal with epidemics. Healing is not a metaphor, it is a call to action.
8. Flip the anxiety switch off
Anxiety can ruin our equilibrium, darken our mood, and make all the already hard tasks of living that much harder. There are many anxiety management strategies you might want to try—breathing techniques, cognitive techniques, relaxation techniques, and so on—but what will make all the difference is if you can locate that inner switch that controls your anxious nature, flip it, and with that gesture flip on more calmness. With that one gesture you announce that you will no longer overdramatize, that you will no longer catastrophize, that you will no longer live a fearful life or create unnecessary anxiety for yourself. Anxiety is part of our warning system against danger, and by locating that switch inside of yourself and flipping it, you declare that you have decided not to live under siege and under threat. Threats remain, but flinging the chemicals of anxiety throughout your system is not really a helpful way to meet those threats. Being calm is better.
9. Make meaning
Our hardest lessons have to do with meaning. We do not understand that meaning is a “mere” psychological experience; we do not realize that adopting strong life purposes helps put meaning in its place; we have probably never thought through what are our exact personal requirements with respect to meaning. We can have much more meaning in our life if we stop looking for it, as if it were lost or as if someone else knew more about it than we did, and realize that it is in our power to influence meaning and even make it. By making daily meaning investments and by seizing daily meaning opportunities, we hold meaning crises at bay and experience life as meaningful. Meaning problems produce severe emotional distress, and learning the art of value-based meaning making dramatically reduces that distress. Learning this requires self-education, since nothing about meaning is taught in schools or by parents.
10. Let meaning trump mood
You can decide that the meaning you hope to make and the life purposes you intend to manifest are more important to you than the mood you find yourself in. Rather than saying, “I’m blue today,” you say, “I have my business to build,” or “I have my novel to write,” or “I have my personality to upgrade.” You start each day by announcing to yourself exactly how you intend to make meaning on that day, how you intend to deal with routine chores and tasks, how you intend to relax—how, in short, you mean to spend your day—and you consider all of that, the rich and the mundane alike, as the project of your life, one in which you are living with grace and in good spirits. You reduce your emotional distress by checking in more on your intentions and less on your mood.
11. Upgrade your personality
You may not yet be the person you would like to be or the person you need to be in order to reduce your emotional distress. You may be angrier than you would like to be, more impulsive, more scattered, more self-sabotaging, more undisciplined, more frightened. If so, you require a personality upgrade, which of course only you can supply. You embark on this upgrade by choosing a feature of your personality that you would like to upgrade and then asking yourself what sorts of thoughts align with this “upgrade” intention and what sorts of actions align with this “upgrade” intention. Then you think the appropriate thoughts and take the necessary action. In this way you become the person you would like to be, someone actually capable of reducing emotional distress.
12. Deal with your circumstances
Would you experience more distress relaxing at the beach or enduring a long jail sentence? Would you experience more distress if you hated going to work or loved going to work? Our circumstances matter to us. Our economic circumstances matter, our relationships matter, our work conditions matter, our health matters, whether our nation is at peace or is occupied by invaders matters. Many circumstances are completely out of our control, and many are within our control. We can change jobs or careers, we can divorce, we can reduce our calorie intake, we can stand up or keep quiet, we can do what we can do to improve our circumstances. As a result of these improvements, we will likely feel emotionally better. Reducing your emotional distress requires that you take real action in the real world.
These tips are of a self-help sort. The recent paradigm of self-help is completely available to anyone who would like to reduce his or her emotional distress. You can understand yourself, form intentions and carry them out, learn from experience, and grow and heal. Naturally, none of this is true if you are unwilling to do the work required. But if you are, you have an excellent chance of reducing your emotional distress and experiencing genuine emotional health.
Emotional health and pain-free living are not the same things. You can be as emotionally healthy as a person can be and still reel from the pain of losing a loved one, from seeing through the meaningfulness of your occupation, or from finding your intimate relationship falling apart. You can be as emotionally healthy as a person can be and still have real troubles every single day accepting your mortality, dealing with your lack of income, or tolerating your chronic pain. We must not judge emotional health by the amount of a pain a person experiences. A moral, mental, and emotional giant may be plagued by sadness; his opposite may be giddy with the pleasure of killing off the competition or acquiring some fine cigars.
What is emotional health, then, if it isn’t the absence of pain? It is a kind of vibrant wisdom, a dynamic executive awareness coupled with a powerful resistance to humbug with a bit of philosophical wryness thrown in, a vibrant wisdom where you acknowledge your human nature and the facts of existence, see your life as your loving and deserving project, and live according to your life purposes and as a value-based meaning-maker. You are completely in the fray and just enough above it to see what the fray is all about. Does pain still arrive? Of course it does. You haven’t learned how to walk on water—what you have learned is how to walk on fire.
I have been trying to make two points. First, there is a mental health establishment that is not doing a wonderful job of helping people in distress. The current establishment is dominated by a way of thinking that has fooled people into believing in the existence of “mental disorders and mental diseases treatable by psychiatric medication,” when in fact the picture is completely different. I have tried to paint my own picture of what better mental health practices might look like. I have described a new helper, the human experience specialist, and outlined a repudiation of the pseudo-medical model of mental health services (with “chemicals with effects” still made available). I have proposed more and better thinking about huge questions concerning cause and effect in human affairs and the need for more and better institutions and communities of care. A paradigm shift really is needed—unless we are prepared to accept the inevitable outcome that soon virtually all children will receive one mental disorder diagnosis or another and will find themselves on powerful chemicals designed to suppress or relieve the symptoms of living.
Second, there is the challenging job that you have of maintaining your own emotional wellbeing and mental health. You will not get through life without emotional distress—a lot of it may be coming. That distress is already woven into you because of the way that personality operates like a straightjacket. That distress plays itself out in human ways like despair, hopelessness, and meaninglessness. It plays itself out through anxieties, addictions, manias, pestering obsessions, critical outbursts, and self-soothing indulgences. This landscape may demoralize you, but it had better not surprise you. Nothing prepared you for it—not your parents, not your schools, not your churches, not your leaders—and so you are obliged to understand your situation using your own wits and your own awareness. That is your starting point—then the work of personal mental health begins.