Nikki Ryall, Mental Health Trainer and Work Based Learning Practitioner reflects on her personal experience of mental health and being an educator in lockdown.
As month 8 arrives during what feels like the longest year of my life, I am currently in reflective mood. Reflecting on what the most difficult bits have been during this confusing, overwhelming and seemingly endless situation where the only certainty is uncertainty and the only constant is change. Fortunately as an educator reflection is part of my job, but as an individual I am naturally inclined towards it in any case.
I wonder if anyone else feels like we are all doing some sort of confusing global ‘hokey cokey’ and whether you too dear reader are experiencing the same challenges as I am in coping with all this. The fact of the matter is that we are experiencing a global trauma and trauma is a very difficult thing to cope with.
These challenges and some of the associated emotions were discussed in my last blog on Mental Health and to be fair the situation does not seem to be getting any better and I am aware that many people are experiencing anxiety or overwhelming emotions who may never have done so before and may be afraid of speaking up for fear of being judged or labelled inadequate, weak, ashamed, mad or ‘not normal’. To try and combat this I thought I would share some of my most recent learning.
I am never afraid of sharing some of the issues I have had with my own mental health in the past, especially since most of us will either experience or will know someone who has experienced a mental health condition in our lifetime. I do this not to wave a flag of suffering but partly to try and encourage others to express their feelings and let people know if they are finding things challenging that this is in fact completely natural. I also want to give them hope that they can manage or overcome their condition and reassure them that it is not a weakness or a barrier to achieving what they want in life. I myself still have a job and a home and friends, have experienced previous mental health issues and I still have times when I feel completely overwhelmed by things, especially these days, but it does not and should not define me.
I have been delivering Mental Health Awareness courses for Panda since last year and there is a plan for some more starting in April 20201 but I am currently writing a new course to raise awareness in mental health issues and provide adult community tutors and learners with some insight into this subject matter which is a joy for me. It is the best way I know of trying to start a conversation about how natural processes in our 21st Century brains can make us think or behave in different and sometimes confusing or challenging ways.
Our brains have evolved very slowly in comparison to our current technological world and are still working on old patterns of keeping us safe, crudely reacting as if our wifi dropping out in the middle of a workshop delivery were the same as being chased by a large and dangerous wild animal. Fear of looking stupid, being in bother with our boss or just failing to achieve our daily targets can all feel like a very big danger, especially when you are confined to your home day in and day out, managing your own emotions as well as those of other family members. It all just feels a bit much!
Having myself suffered from depression and anxiety I have felt myself sliding towards negative thought patterns and emotions and although I do know some of the ways to try and combat these things (see previous Mental Health blog for tips) my lizard brain – my ancient and historic safety mechanism can be difficult to keep quiet, like children and animals during Zoom calls.
“So, what now?” I hear you ask. Is there no hope?
I believe there is always hope.
One thing I have been reading about recently is compassion.
Compassion from others as well as compassion for ourselves. The idea that we can and are encouraged to forgive ourselves and others for behaviour and reactions. It all sounds quite straightforward in principle, but I wonder how many of us find it easy to forgive others for their anger, sadness or other challenges, but have a difficulty forgiving ourselves for similar things. To start with, if we were to forgive ourselves, we might be less worried about judgement and be able to speak out when we are finding things difficult. We might worry less about how we would be received and in doing so we might be able to help others see that by speaking up they might be understood without fear of being labelled, avoided or pitied. I often ask people who are being hard on themselves and showing themselves no compassion if they would be so hard on a friend or someone they love.
I have explained above that many of our reactions come from systems and chemicals in our brains which are set off automatically to keep us safe. I wonder whether we are feeling safe right now?
I wonder whether, if we have had times in the past where we have felt very unsafe, these memories are coming up in our brains right now and in fact are adding to our feelings of insecurity. I wonder if we are angry with our children, partner, boss, colleagues or others because our brains are telling us we are in danger and we are just triggering the fight part of the “Fight, Flight, Freeze or Submit” response? I wonder if the reason we are finding it hard to concentrate is because our brain is so taken up with assessing the alert level around us, constantly reignited by a news bulletin, a phone-call, some bad news? If this is indeed the case, don’t we deserve some understanding for reacting in natural and what may be historically automatic ways?
We may be familiar with the fight, flight, freeze labels but the latter ‘submit’ part of the reactions I mention above is something I have become aware of by reading a book about recovering from trauma, a self-help book recommended when I underwent some training for my counselling placement (see below for reference). This book is all about compassion, about understanding that our brains work in certain ways and that by forgiving ourselves for our natural and sometimes automatic or learned responses that we can begin to relearn what is and is not safe. It is a fascinating exploration of how the brain reacts and where our security and insecurity responses come from. It gives hope that we can relearn more helpful patterns of behaviour and can retrain our brains to help us feel more safe and this in turn can help us cope with situations such as we are in right now which might remind us of and trigger previous trauma.
It recommends that we start by forgiving ourselves, being kind to ourselves as we would to others and to try to think how we might respond to a friend who is finding things challenging. It also helps to put things into perspective, to disentangle the complex nature of our human reactions and to make these things seem more ‘normal’ and less ‘mad’.
As an educator reading has been my way of getting through lockdown and the endless hours of being at home with my anxiety growing, as the news reports get ever more scary and the weather gets more wintry. I am taking time to start to retrain my brain and help myself to find ways to keep being hopeful and less judgemental of myself. Learning is always my solution to everything and I know it helps me to cope if I can understand what is going on. I may not be able to wave a magic wand to end the global pandemic, but I can learn to live with myself and others while it continues by giving myself a hug and being kind.
I hope that some of you might find the book below an interesting read and that it will help you to take on board and promote the message that mental health is not scary and if we are kind to ourselves and others, we can all get through these times with compassion and hopefulness despite the difficulties.
Lee, D (2012). The Compassionate Mind Approach to Recovering from Trauma using Compassion Focused Therapy. London: Robinson.
