Surrendering to our mental illness; a mindful perspective
We are living in a time where our world is defined by mental health conditions, and our relationship to them. Anxiety, depression, panic disorders and substance abuse are only a few of these mental burdens that millions of people carry everyday. They permeate cultures across the globe, and there seems to be no slowing in sight.
The World Health Organization ranks depression as, ‘The leading cause of disability worldwide, and is a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease.’
No matter how much we want to be or think we can be, none of us are immune to these illnesses, including me. My personal experience with more than one of these conditions, gives me the particular ability to attest to their validity and immense toll that they can take on a person.
Panic, anxiety and the crippling discomfort that comes along with them, has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve been plagued with an anxiety disorder that has fogged most of my days ever since I was little. On a good day, it used to leave me feeling utterly exhausted and completely lost.
To add fuel to the flame, trauma entered my life and only exasperated the conditions my brain and body were already fighting to balance out. I developed PTSD, and the years that followed are a blur of pain, more trauma, and a quickly growing hatred toward myself.
When we don’t learn what to do with our pain and how to sit with it, we often take drastic measures to make it stop. We drink, do drugs and hurt ourselves in attempts to escape the pain of our present moment. According to the WHO, suicide is the second leading cause of death in people ages 15–29 across the globe.
Research by Susan David P.h.D. shows that we as human beings, push away unwanted and uncomfortable feelings. We judge our feelings as bad, because they don’t ‘feel good.’ We cover them up, ignore them, or push them away in hopes of changing the present moment from what is, to what we want it to be. Something less painful, and ‘happier.’
My life is a testament to this perpetual shoving away of ‘negative’ feelings in hopes of somehow exchanging them for ‘better’ ones. I have spent years pushing away and ignoring painful thoughts and emotions, and as people, that’s what we do. We are our own worst critics, and that little voice inside our heads that shouts, ‘You are not good enough,’ needs to be silenced somehow.
Why not just glaze it over with something prettier, and happier? Like putting a nice, smiley sticker on a clearly gushing wound. Out of sight, out of mind. Ignoring it will eventually make it better, right? Wrong.
The ‘smiley sticker’ I tried to place over my anxiety and panic combined with PTSD eventually fed into depression over time, and I was left with painful, unbearable feelings at a young age. As a teenager I ignored my illnesses and over time, they got worse. In attempts to escape and push away my present moment, I started to cut myself.
I slipped further and further into the darkness of mental illness and further and further away from myself. My time and energy was spent convincing myself and everyone else that I was perfectly fine, when in fact I was not. I tried desperately to change what my present moment was, because it was too painful and unbearable for me not to.
After years of therapists, medications, and more trauma, I somehow made it to my mid 20’s; still deeply affected by anxiety, depression and PTSD. I could see no end in sight, and I was running out of viable options that were accessible to me.
I reached a crossroads with myself, and I had a choice to make: do something, or do nothing. I couldn’t just keep doing the same things, expecting a different result; that’s not how it works. I look back at this time in my life as a defining moment, a game changer in my very existence. And it took a lot of excruciating work to get there.
Mindfulness entered my life at a crucial and transitional time, and I was privileged and fortunate enough to have wonderful teachers to help introduce me to this path. On a whim, I attended an 8 week MBSR (Mindfulness based stress reduction) course that I found through an internet search. At the time, it was about as much energy as I could muster while dealing with my conditions, and working more than full time.
My goal was to find some kind of relief from the constant weight of carrying conditions like PTSD and depression, and just maybe, get rid of them once and for all.
How ambitious of me; getting rid of the ailments that have weighed me down for my entire life in just 8 short weeks.
I’ve never been so wrong.
Although I tried to purge myself and my life of mental illness and all the havoc it had caused, it didn’t turn out that way. I did however learn about acceptance, which catapulted me on to a path of awareness and allowing.
Mindfulness, by definition, is becoming aware of the present moment without any judgment, and accepting whatever it is we may find or experience there. People have been practicing mindfulness for thousands of years and recent scientific research by Jon Kabat-Zinn shows its immense capacity for healing and overcoming.
I had nothing left to lose except more pieces of myself, so I showed up week after week and soaked up as much as I possibly could. I didn’t realize until much later the deeply penetrating effect that mindfulness had on my mind and body. It changed the way I saw myself and it changed the way I saw the world; to this day I can still feel it in my bones.
One of the foundational pillars of the mindful movement is acceptance. Acceptance of the present moment that we are in, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable it may be. No matter how riddled with anxiety and depression it may be. But what does that really mean?
ac·cept·ance
the action of consenting to receive or undertake something offered
When we spend time trying to change the present moment into what we want it to be, instead of seeing it for what it is, it only adds to the often times excruciating tension and suffering that already exists there. I did it for years, and sometimes I still do.
I was once working a food service job and accidentally sliced the top of my finger off with a knife. It was horrendously painful, but had I ignored the cut or pushed away the fact that I was even cut at all, the only possible outcome would be to bleed all over myself, creating more stress than the original stressor itself.
This is what we do with our emotional feelings when we deem them to be ‘too much’ for us. We ignore them or try to change them, and in turn it creates more personal suffering. We wouldn’t respond this way to a physical injury, but our automatic inclination toward our own painful emotions is to pretend like they aren’t there at all or turn them into something else completely.
After I completed the 8-week MBSR course, I felt exactly the same. I still had anxiety, depression and PTSD and acceptance didn’t make them go away. In the year that followed my training, I did however, experience a crippling depression that forced me to utilize the skills I somehow managed to learn in the months prior.
I typically have a good memory, but this time in my life is admittedly more than a little fuzzy looking back on it. It was a time of immense pain, but also immense growth. I became the person that I am today through this mindful experience with depression, and it changed my life.
Depression has never hit me like a bag of bricks with no warning. My experience with depression has always been that of a slow and silent darkness; creeping in over periods of time. It isn’t until the darkness has set in so much that its tightening grip of shame and sadness feels so strong, that I am choking on my own breath, do I realize the position I am in.
This round of depression brought me to an alarmingly sudden halt through sheer exhaustion. I slept for upwards of sixteen hours a day, every day, for weeks. I felt like I was catching up on sleep I had missed for years and I was thrown into a strange reality where being awake felt more like swimming in the dark.
As I bounced back and forth between being completely exhausted, and being lucid enough to process what was happening, words from my teachers echoed in the back of my mind. I would find myself in a fetal position being swallowed up by my depression, only to hear a voice in my head telling me that my feelings were allowed and to be gentle with myself.
Being one of the millions of people affected by mental illness is hard. Being depressed is hard, and it seems like there is no choice in anything all the time. These conditions are labeled as illnesses for a reason and they are excruciating to heal from and overcome, and some people never do.
Mindfulness doesn’t depend on what’s happening, it’s how we relate to what is happening. Bringing awareness and acceptance to what is going on in our lives helps us relate better to ourselves, and our challenges. It gives us space and support to show up where we are at, and helps us manage what is happening.
Acceptance of our present moment doesn’t mean that it will change, but it does mean that we stop trying to change what it really is. Surrendering can give us an action to take acceptance one step further.
Surrendering is active; it does not mean that we have to like everything and abandon our values and principles. It does mean however, that when we stop fighting the moment that we are in, we can show up for ourselves, no matter how painful and uncomfortable it is. We can respond to whatever may be happening to or around us with a little more space, kindness and understanding.
sur·ren·der
cease resistance to an enemy or opponent
For years I fought myself and the fact that there was anything wrong at all. I responded to my depression by hurting myself more, to my anxiety by pretending I was fine, and to my PTSD by telling myself it wasn’t even happening and to just ‘be positive.’
Surrendering to my conditions changed everything. As soon as I stopped fighting, I was able to stop treating my mental illnesses like an enemy, and instead treat them for what they were. The simple act of surrendering allowed me enough time and space to take a step back from myself, and decide what would help most in the moment.
Allowing something so detrimental, to be what it is, seems counter intuitive. Making space and time for something that has ravaged my system for years sounds like exactly the wrong move to make. I had already resolved to approach myself and my depression differently, and it involved making a lot of tough choices.
I began to see what my depression was doing to me. How it affected the way my brain gathered thoughts and relayed information. I began to see my anxiety as a constrictor, and finally started to see what it was doing to my physical body.
Over time, I was able to pay attention to myself more. I felt like I had somehow woken up from a dream I didn’t know I was having. Like I was sleepwalking, and all of a sudden, I wasn’t anymore. I would have a particularly hard day, full of crying and breaking down and my response was to surrender. Surrender to feeling horrible and exhausted and depressed. Surrender to the moment I was in, and welcome my conditions with open arms.
Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life
— Susan David
Mindfulness isn’t a cure-all for anything; it won’t fix the challenges that we with mental illness face. It will however, help us with forming a better relationship with ourselves and our conditions. It is a constant practice that takes effort and awareness and an attitude of surrendering that is built over time, but it’s worth it.
Life with mental illness is difficult, but that does not mean that we are doomed to live a life of unending torture. We have higher mountains to climb and deeper seas to swim, but when we can surrender to ourselves in the moment with compassion, we create the capacity to heal ourselves.
