What are you meaning when you say that you are mentally healthy?
Do you have to go online and look up definitions?
If you do, I would bet somethings wrong with you because just like people who do not have issues with intoxicants, like alcohol or marijuana or cocaine, people who don’t have mental health issues don’t care whether or not they are mentally healthy. And, in truth, whether or not you think they have a problem doesn’t really matter, contrary how frustrating that might be for you.
😄
When you start to think about this idea, I would wonder that you might have some sort of feeling about presumptuousness or that I am suggesting that everyone’s got mental issues.
Maybe, but
I think it’s closer to that You only have a mental issue if you think you do.
Now, think about that for three seconds…
WHAT IS DISSOCIATION?
Many of you may not know, so by the way:
There is dissociation, and then there is Dissociative Identity Disorder.
(Also note: the United States has its own mental disorder classification and designation made by the American psychiatric Association. Europe and the rest of the world has its own Bible of mental disorders. They overlap in a lot of areas, but there’s a lot of things that are different as well.)
Dissociative identity disorder, or DID, is what we typically know of as multiple personality disorder, but it could be other types of things, having multiple personalities one manifestation.
Today I’m writing about the more generalized mental health notion of dissociation.
The Task of Mental Health
The reason why I’m making these posts, is because my job is to help you, the person who might be suffering from mental issues, to use your own resources. And, a lot of times I feel that Therapists forget this. Many Therapists unwittingly approach clients as if they’re kind of stupid. I am a culprit; I think that’s just part of being human.
And there’s an official name for this phenomenon in psychology, in mental health: it’s called the Fixing Response.
We deal with this all the time with clients in relationships who can’t figure out why their partners upset with them. Much of the time it’s because their partner is coming for Support, and then they reply with how they’re gonna fix it for them, which is not what the partner wanted, and all sorts of discord ensues.
But when we do this as Therapists, as professionals and experts, we are basically sending the message to you that you are powerless over your own being your own well-being, at that, implicitly signaling to you that there is something wrong with you, confirming to you there is something else dreadful happening to you that needs to be fixed.
What a social conundrum we face in those situations !!
So, among other helpful things we can offer …
I feel that the best thing that I can do is to help you be more educated and intelligent in how you approach your own life.
Dissociation.
As a mental health therapist, my job really is to be skeptical and hesitant of labeling you with any sort of “disorder”. It can be helpful, but it can likewise be harmful.
Now, to some people that might seem kind of odd that I’m saying this. We are so accustomed to thinking of mental health has something to do with something that is known, some sort of disease, disorder, some problem that we know about, and so on. I understand that; if we can name some thing a lot of times we feel like we’re on the road to controlling it, and if it’s bad, then we feel like we’ve made a step towards fixing it making it into something good.
The truth of the matter is that the way you get better is to stop worrying about whatever problem you think you have. Or, you learn how to cope with it. And I would submit that if you’re learning how to cope with your mental problem, then it’s probably not a problem. And if it is a problem, you’re probably not coping with it very well.
This goes to the point that is well known: Ask any psychiatrist or any psychologist about what a mental issue or a mental disorder is, and if you actually press into them and they are reasonably intelligent about what they know, and are honest with you, they will tell you that no one really knows. And that treatments for mental health issues are kind of like an educational best guess. We are all (presumably) trying our best.
If you were to get any other answer from a professional then the one there, then it is most likely that the professional is thinking about your well-being, under the idea that you were coming to them, a professional in mental health, with the question about a mental issue that you are dealing with. And so their answer is covering their own ass.
Sorry. 🫡
Indeed we are practicing treatment for mental health.
Ok….. that was my sort of preamble…
I’m not sure the word dissociation really means anything. I use the word. I use it with clients, clients describe their symptoms as “I dissociate”, and sometimes they are telling me what their experience is and I’ll tell them “you’re dissociating”.
Ok.
But I think that word is kind of inaccurate, and actually conveys a certain signal, a certain meaning which I’m not sure is very helpful at times.
Let me explain.
Explanation Withdraw
The actual experience I feel is more like a withdrawal into one Self.
And that this withdrawal into oneself, ironically, doesn’t feel good.
But then again, sometimes we call dissociation what people call “zoning out”, like, they just kinda forget where they’re at and space out or get withdrawn into thoughts.
But that also speaks to me something that they’re supposed to do.
What am I supposed to do? What are you supposed to do?
Maybe Dissociating is exactly what you’re supposed to do, but you feel, somehow, that it’s very wrong, that you are not supposed to do that.
What a terrible experience to have the experience of doing something that you intuitively feel you’re not supposed to do!
What do you do with that?
Of course, if you’re doing something that could compromise your actual life or physical safety, like driving a car or working on heavy machinery, withdrawing into yourself might not be very good.
However
In any case, I wonder that these implicit messages of good and bad, right and wrong, healthy illness, when it comes to one’s sense and sensibility of self, one’s mental health, are inadvertently contributing to someone’s mental health problem because they are simply doing what they’ve done since birth: I.e. they are believing that there is a proper way to be themselves and they are referring to people around them, such as when they were a child they referred to their parents first and then to different orders of society next, to give them signals about whether they are actually being the way they’re supposed to be.
I see it is part of my job to help a person develop their own sense of permission to be who they are.
What it dissociation? It seems like the experiencing of a mixed message of trying to be something that I am not.
Good luck.
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