Radical Acceptance

This week’s blog is guest written by Elizabeth Estall. Liz is a social media manager who specialises in content creation, copywriting and consultancy. She’s one of my favourite people to chat about mental health with and always a go-to when I feel like I need something clearing in my mind.
Oh, and one day we’ll do a podcast together!

Here is Radical Acceptance -

I’m not supposed to be feeling like this.

I remember wailing this statement to my dad in the dining room of my childhood home, in the midst of a postnatal depression nightmare. It felt, for all the good it did, like the world and their wife had rallied round to help me in any and every way they could.

The truth is (as prone as I am to exaggerating for comic effect!) I really had never felt that way before. Not even close.

I was painfully depressed, extremely anxious, and spiralling. I was not coping.  

And this very unhelpful, loaded statement, “I’m not *supposed* to be feeling like this”, kept me stuck in this hell for MONTHS.

I tried logic. That person’s baby is way more ‘problematic’. That lady doesn’t even have a partner/mum/friends to help. That mum is having way less sleep than me. She should be feeling way worse.

I made the mistake a lot of mums do of using the correlation of birth/baby and sudden arrival of depression and anxiety and came up with ‘I must not be coping with the baby’. When, in hindsight, it was just a mix of sleep deprivation, wider family issues and pressure, working in a toxic environment leading up to the birth. It was NORMAL. If anything it could be argued that it was expected.

But, of course, I really didn’t see it that way. My baby was perfect, my life wasn’t particularly problematic, I had no business feeling anything other than wonderful. I *should* have been coping!

Like I said, I stayed stuck with this logic and its confusion for a long time. Why do I feel like this? Where did this come from? Until, when sitting with a friend one day, she provided me with a hilariously harsh eureka moment. She said:

‘Liz, you’re not special.’

She was just pointing out something that I’d heard a lot. That is, that mental health doesn’t discriminate. Rich, poor, healthy, poorly… anyone can actually feel like this. But something about the way that friend said on that day, and the fact that its harshness made me laugh out loud, really spoke to me. It changed something for me fundamentally. The way I understood what was happening in my head.

Blown me down. She’s right! Why shouldn’t I be feeling like this? Why *wouldn’t* I be feeling like this?! And, for goodness sake,… who cares?!

We’re here now. It sucks but we’re here now. We can only deal with what is. No logic, comparison, or any other unhelpful thinking style matters in this place and it’s actually quite glorious when it finally sinks in.

I am depressed. I am anxious. Now what do I do?

And what happens is you finally stand on the long and winding road to recovery. Acceptance being the first step. You will have to realise, understand and understand another ten times over (at least) that looking after your mental health is a priority. It wasn’t before, it probably didn’t need to be but that was a privilege that you weren’t aware of. You always matter and there's no end date to prioritising mental health.

That might sound daunting but it’s not as lonely, it’s not as confusing and it’s more peaceful overall. You stop judging every single thought and feeling. You start to stop expecting good mental health as a given.

It has made me wonder over the past 10 years or so what more we can be doing to change and avoid ourselves getting stuck like this.

Do we need to teach children emotional regulation? Do we need to prepare them for feeling awful? Do we need to prepare them for grief, anxiety, spotting the red flags of abuse and many more life delights?

Perhaps ‘mental health help’ doesn’t always need to be full blown charities, services and resources. Maybe, for some families, it can just be simple conversations around thoughts and feelings. Encouraging rest, self expression and radical acceptance of what is.

And remembering…

We’re not special!

Pass it on. ;)