Crafting a Healthy Home Rhythm Part 6 - Mental Health

This one is tough.  Mental health.  What does that mean exactly?

Good mental health doesn't mean that you don't have bad days.  It doesn't mean you are the perfect mother.  It doesn't mean even than you are medication free. Good mental health starts with being a proactive participant in your own care.  It means knowing when to get help.  It means allowing yourself to feel pain.  It also means knowing how to not throw poo.  Let's talk about poo.  If you are new to our work then you might be pretty grossed out - stick with me.  Poo is gross.  If it gets on you then you can't wait to get it off.  It stinks.  It stains. It is the last thing that we want on us, our shoes, our clothes... what about our loved ones?  We don't like them to have poo on them either. Poo can come in many forms.  I am talking about emotional poo.  Emotional poo is the stuff that comes out when we aren't taking good mental care of ourselves.

*Please know, I am NOT talking about depression, I will talk about that more in a minute.  Right now I am talking about emotionally unhealthy people that love pain and drama.

Pain and drama!  Yes.  We all know someone that is super dramatic and loves to tell you all the horror stories in their lives.  We get off the phone and we are drained.  Worn out. Spent. Ask yourself if you do that to anyone?

Emotional poo is the stuff that hangs on from an unhealthy childhood and try as we might, we are making the same really crappy mistakes that our parents made.  Emotional poo comes out when we are sheltering our children from things and we think we are doing something huge but sometimes we might just be making a bigger deal out of things. Poo isn't nice.  Poo keeps us from standing in the light.  So now that you have a sense for poo, let's think about how we can get it gone.

I mentioned before that I don't consider depression as part of this really - why? Well I think there is a lot of misdiagnosing that happens with moms.  We are complex, complicated beings with postpartum and nursing hormones running through us and some temperaments presenting differently than others when faced with those. That doesn't mean I don't think some moms needs medical help, that is not it at all, but I do think if you are continually struggling, then stand back and re-evaluate.  I know a mom that recently got taken off of depression meds and put on something for ADD, she said it changed her life, all this time she was misdiagnosed and that cost her precious time with her family and really, with herself.  So if you are struggling don't give up, get to the bottom of things.  I do believe that 99% of what we have going on can be taken care of without medication.  We have to remember the recipe for feeling good... rest...eating right...moving our bodies.  Those three things are the magic combination for good mental health in general.  Then take your temperament into account, we talked about that a bit last week.  Working with our own temperament can be tricky, but it is good to know "hey, so *that* is why I want to curl up and not leave the sofa! I am not depressed, I am phlegmatic!"  While they are generalizations, it is amazing how accurate they are.  I tend to focus on adult temperament far more than my children.  I need to lead before I can diagnose :) Plus, when I take care of me, then I can take care of everyone else.  So again, if you battle depression, look at it on many levels.  You may still end up with medication, but remember that isn't a magic bullet, you still have to take care of ourselves.

So you are working on your inner work, it starts to bring up some things from your past that you aren't super thrilled with, so now what?  We have to work on releasing that.  The short answer is that we have to get rid of our own baggage - emotional poo - so that we can move on and not give it to our kids. We tend to give it to our kids in the weirdest of ways and it is usually part of our good intentions. How?  Well I can share something I did. I grew up Catholic.  In my 20s I decided that didn't work for me so I took everything that I thought was wrong with the Catholic church and lumped that into some pretty intense negativity.  I decided that I couldn't have the patriarchal side and still honor myself as a mother.  I was looking at life through very narrow lenses.  One day my son, 6 or so at the time, asked me why we hated Christians. Stopped. Me. Cold.  What? We don't hate Christians!  Crazy boy why would you even think that? Out of the mouths of babes come truths unimagined.  I started to examine the extremes I had gone to and just how they affected my children and their perception of the world.  I started looking at tolerance and forgiveness and unconditional love.  I didn't want to bring my issues to my children.  As the story would have it, within a few years I came back to Christianity, but with a much different outlook.  I started really trying to see people the way the Creator does.  This was an amazing transformation of a poo poo situation. There are things MUCH deeper that we carry around. We carry the deepest fears that our parents give us about being a good girl or doing enough or being dumb or wasting our lives or insert your own big ugly bag of poop here. It isn't fun.  It needs to be dealt with.  It is time to get busy on what hangs us up.  Don't worry about what hangs Dad up right now or what hangs your sister up.  Worry about you.  When you get healthy then things change. People seem to change.  Our children's behaviors even change. It is amazing AMAZING what can happen in a house where Mom loves herself, is confident and feels good.  It can happen.  If you are not in that place right now, go, grab a sheet of paper and as soon as you are finished reading this, I want you to write.  WHY are you not feeling good?  I challenged a mom the other day to tell me who she was without her engineering degree. She was a little stumped.  Before you are a mom.  Before you are a career woman.  Before you are a wife. You are a beautiful creation of the Divine.  God loves you.  God wants you to love you.  Just like it hurts you when your children talk down about themselves, it hurts God when we don't respect ourselves or we allow someone to hurt us.  Christian or Jew. Native or Pagan.  Muslim or Hindu.  You are a Divine child.  Loved. Cared for on High. Sought after. You are a virtuous woman no matter what you think you have done in the past to change it.  It can begin right now.  Today.  I want you to stop reading and hug yourself.  I want you to know that I know you are worthy.  I know you have strength you have yet to tap.  I know you can do this.  You are wonderful.  Today is the day to stop making excuses and get busy.  You have a lot of loving you to do.

I am here for you.

Part 1 HERE
Part 2 HERE
Part 3 HERE
Part 4 HERE
Part 5 HERE

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