I’ve been doing a big re-listen of My Favorite Murder, and I guess I’d forgotten how much Karen and Georgia talk about mental health and therapy, and given the big fight I blogged about last week, it’s been giving me a lot to think about…
It feels like my generation is at one extreme end of a spectrum of navigating emotional/mental wellness by analyzing everything and digging into issues and trying to get to the root of problems. And while I do think that understanding the cause of behavioral problems allows you to fix those problems, I think that we got stuck down there in the pit of analysis instead of taking the next step and climbing out of it and filling it in behind us. And even if we do climb out, we leave the pit there, open and yawning and waiting.
(And by “we,” I mostly mean me.)
There’s a common conception that generations past, such as my grandparents’ generation, relied more on the method of not dealing with problems and maybe they’ll go away. And while I don’t think that’s the answer either, I don’t know that digging deep into trauma on a constant basis is the answer either.
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, and this has all just occurred to me in the last few days.
And I can hear you saying, “Well, yeah. Not every problem deserves to be analyzed,” but you have to realize that this is all new to me. What I experienced in therapy was that I should be analyzing things and figuring out the root cause of whatever issue so I could address it directly. And maybe it’s just that me and that therapist really didn’t gel (and I don’t see that therapist anymore), but I’m realizing now that the path I thought would lead to answers is not the path for me. And that’s an uncomfortable realization to come to.
Amber Sorensen 