Getting Mentally Fit in Your Marriage and Life
You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have. - JRR Tolkien
Ah, what a perfect quote to open up our conversation and podcast this week about integrating self-care in our bodies, hearts, and now our brains also. (My favorite realm!)
Yes, healthily analyzing and taking care of our brain health is so important. This is because we often move our bodies and our emotions by way of our brain. Thus, the way we use it or forget to use it heavily influences these other parts of us.
So in a multi-dimensional Ms. Frizzle-like fashion, let’s pull open your brain to see how you're doing in your thought life.
What are you learning? Are you keeping your neurons growing and malleable?
Do you ruminate or imagine for long periods of time, resisting taking part in real life?
Is worry taking over, paralyzing you, causing somatic complaints?
It’s so important that you look carefully. Feelings are so important, but do they control you?
When we allow feelings to lock us in for too long (we’re all totally prone to this late January!) we can miss out on an important aspect of self-care, mental health.
This is especially crucial to normalize since depression and anxiety have seeped into almost everyone's lives a bit more in these last two years with a bit more regularity, especially with the vast illness and uncertainty the world has faced together and yet awkwardly five feet apart, metaphorically speaking...
So, though emotions do threaten to overtake us, I hope you'll take active steps to health to combat this.
You can do this by not letting your laments take you on a journey. Instead, you take your laments on the journey with intention.
For example, if you're feeling any big feeling that seems to be taking over (sad, mad, scared, angry, embarrassed, ashamed, etc), consider when you can take time with these feelings so you can process them alone and if married, together as well so your partner at least knows what's up. Find a reasonable amount of time for yourself (5 min, 10 min, 30 min). Allow time to process it. Schedule it in if needed but don't stay there all day.
Also, make sure it bows back up after the dip down. How will you end this time? With gratitude, with a plan, with a walk, with an uplifting song, with a prayer? After allowing this time to lament, you must take intentional time to allow your mind to bring you back to health.
So whether your mental health care comes in the form of spiritual help, fitness, over-the-counter help, funny TV shows, the creative arts, or some combination of this, more likely, prioritize it. (Hint: Memorizing Encanto lyrics to We Don't Talk About Bruno to improve mood and brain function does indeed count!)...
In addition, I also recommend you listen to the specific mental health and marriage tips from Marriage Puzzle's Juli and Thomas on this week's podcast (Julie 3, Thomas 9). We share tips for healthy thinking individually and as a couple and I loved hearing from each of their creative brains! :)
It's also OK to seek additional help if you need more than just these reminders.
Yes, though there is still a bit of stigma out there but mental health care is so life-giving. I can never leave this time of year without sharing that as a requiem for my parents. My mother's medications saved her life so she could be an excellent mother to her four children and she and my father were so passionate about mental heart care because of this. My dad spent his retirement years working with my sister at Team Mental Health where mom was a client and my mom spend her better years writing essays about the injustices of how mental health patients were treated in psychiatric facilities.
However, had she not gotten at least some care, the extreme burdens her schizophrenic episodes would have placed on us as children would not have allowed us to thrive at all. As the youngest child, I never saw one of the episodes till my twenties after she had a stroke, and it made me extremely grateful for those meds. Only then did I understand my father's overtures about a psychiatrist who gave him his wife back with his brilliant titration of the elements.
So if you're in this spot as a parent, as an adult, or as a teen reading this, don't be afraid to get mental health care. If you're finding your family health is in question because of your lapsing judgment, addiction, or a suspected untreated psychiatric illness, there are wonderful medical providers out there.
As Tolkien reminded us above, you have indeed been chosen and you must use strength, heart, and wits as you have for the incredible adventures ahead!
Love and live well, my friend!
Love living intentionally with you,
Christa
PS: Take a listen to the podcast here!
PPS: Check out our February events below!
- Our Valentine’s free marriage virtual E + M conference is Feb 8, 7-9PM EST and you can sign up here
- Our E + M Coaches Certification Course is here. The course is only running one time this year so make sure you sign up if you want to gain certification to work with couples using the best Enneagram and Marriage tools and frameworks.
