Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:07 Hey friends, welcome to village church mental health. Today. We're going to be having a conversation on when do I go get help. One
Speaker 1 00:00:16 Is it that the things that are going inside of my heart and my mind and my body, they're getting to a place that I need to solicit the help of someone else to get past these and to begin to grow and heal and make some changes today, I'm going to be giving you a framework that kind of revolves around three at different points of this is how we know that it's time to go get help. But before that, I just want to give a disclaimer and say, you go get help. As soon as you know that you need to go get help. I'm going to hopefully give you a reference point for one. This is really getting into diagnosing territory, but I can't tell you how much that the scope of mental health would change. If all of us just spring on the opportunity to go get help from a friend, from a mentor, from a pastor, from a small group leader, from whoever it is right. When we began to have that awareness, that something isn't right here, because you see all of us, whether it's diagnosable yet or not, we all have tendencies. And we all have traits towards different things in our story that lead us and want to call us towards a path of unhealthy living. But if we can begin to stop those things before they grow and they flourish into something that begins to take over our community with like very different.
Speaker 1 00:01:40 So the first thing that we're going to talk about today, when we begin to get help is when we began to see that these things we are experiencing are interfering with our ability to live our daily life. Sometimes that's a really hard thing to admit sometimes that's because other people are telling us that it used to be like that, but that memory of what life used to be like before, this was such a big and daily part of our stories. It's a very distant memory. And sometimes we can even talk ourselves that this new life, this new way of being it's, it's fine. It's, it's great. And as we talked about before last time and the way we build feedback solutions, that's where we need the community of voices speaking into our life to be able to remind us, no, no, this isn't great. And this is not who God has created you to be.
Speaker 1 00:02:35 So the first thing is when it begins to interfere with our daily life. The second thing is when we begin to meet what we call different criteria for a diagnosis. So in today's modern, wonderful world, all it really takes is you being able to Google, what would be the diagnostic criteria for let's say, generalized anxiety disorder immediately. You would have a of information at your fingertips where you would begin to see, Hmm, this is what actually the professionals have been trained to look at and identify in me in order to diagnose me with something. So let's take generalized anxiety disorder as we sometimes call it, get as an example, the diagnostic criteria for that are the presence of excessive anxiety and worry about a variety of topics, events, or activities. Worry, occurs more often than not for at least six months and is clearly excessive, right?
Speaker 1 00:03:32 So there's timeframes in there. There are limits and it's excessive is how it's being described. The worries experience is very challenging to control the worry in both children and adults may easily shift from one topic to another. It doesn't, it's not a phobia. It's not something particular. It just, the worry, it bounces around from place to place. The anxiety and worry are accompanied by at least three of the following physical or cognitive symptoms. And in children, it's actually just one, there's a sense of edginess or restlessness. They get tired, eat tired, easily, more fatigued than usual impaired concentration or feeling as though their mind just goes blink. Sometimes irritability, which may yeah, or may not be observable to others because maybe they keep it all in, but in their mind, they're thinking good gravy. Well, what are you doing right now? Increase muscle aches or soreness because there, again, we see that sometimes this comes out in our bodies and difficulty sleeping due to trouble falling asleep, staying asleep restlessness at night or unsatisfying sleep. So that's just an example of so many times when we're looking at what this diagnosis looks like, actually available on the internet. Now you can't diagnose yourself. You can't totally be like now I have diagnosed myself with generalized anxiety disorder, but what this information does do is it oftentimes it can give you a starting point to be able to be like,
Speaker 2 00:04:56 Oh, I have all of those.
Speaker 1 00:04:59 Maybe, actually, this is something that I need to go get help with because I wasn't totally connecting that. My muscle aches were maybe connected to my anxiety, but they are they're tied together. And I would absolutely encourage you as you look at this diagnostic criteria for you to begin to move towards, to getting help. And the third, yeah, the way that I like to look at is to kind of begin to build maybe a little bit more of a detailed structure for what it looks like to diagnose our fruit. Because you see in the book of Matthew, Jesus is talking and he's actually talking about being a hypocrite, but he's talking about that. We have good fruits and that we have a bad fruits and that a tree can only really bring forth one thing. But where is this fruit coming from? Well, the fruit is it's coming from the inside of the tree.
Speaker 1 00:05:49 The fruit is the overflow of what is stirring and what the tree is feeding on and what is happening in the health that tree. And you see so many times we don't take the time to look at what our fruit looks like. Like I know so many times people who are caught up, particularly in the midst of anxiety, it's such a, it's such a wind whirlwind. It's such a tornado of feelings and experiences both in our mind and our body. And we have rapid heart rate. We have shortness of breath, many stomach aches, all sorts of different digestive problems can be a part of this racing, mind, feeling lightheaded, wanting to avoid a lot of different circumstances. Having sometimes like a very odd sense of doom that just kind of, everything's going to go bad. Just kind of hangs over everything, feeling disoriented, having hard time, making decisions, muscle aches, or restlessness soreness like we talked about, right? Those sleep disturbances, irritability, brain fog, fatigue, sweating, shaking, having a tremor and just a general sense of weakness. These things, our body shouting to us, trying to communicate clearly to us. Something is not okay in what is going on, but oftentimes when we're in the midst of this experience of anxiety, it's very hard to kind of pull all these yeah. Experiences into one list and see,
Speaker 2 00:07:15 Oh, okay, it's kind of a big picture. It's got
Speaker 1 00:07:21 Lots of different facets. And actually there's lots of different things that I just keep persevering through, but these are not the way that my body and my mind were created to work.
Speaker 2 00:07:33 And as we begin
Speaker 1 00:07:34 To diagnose, I want to look at four different things that I think are helpful for us to look at, to begin to see, okay. And this anxiety, I can always feel often times feel lost and confused, overwhelmed. And like, my head is spinning and I don't know about you, but I perpetually have had a messy room most of my life to the point where I'm like, oh, this is extremely overwhelming. Anytime I go into a hoarder's house, right? It's an extremely overwhelming feeling to walk in and think, where do we even start? So I hope, but in our time to get date, I'm helping you to articulate where do you start in? The first place I want you to start is I want you to begin to look at what do I need to admit is going on of an app and it's for my plants because I'm a plant mom.
Speaker 1 00:08:23 And I have an app that when I pointed at the plant, it tells me what is wrong with this plant? Let's say there's some brown spots on my fiddle fig, right. And I'm trying to, what does this need? I don't speak plants. I don't know. It's not able to communicate to me what it's feeling and what it's thinking, but what I do know is something's wrong. And so this app is super helpful because it helps me to admit and to identify what it is that's going wrong. And then what I need to do in order to give attention to it and to be able to lean in and help that plant. And so it's much actually the same when we're having different struggles with our mental health. The first stage is for us to be able to admit this is what's going on. So that kind of laundry list that I just gave you of symptoms that all kind of tie into generalized anxiety disorder.
Speaker 1 00:09:11 I think it's very helpful for you to sit down with a pen and a paper and begin to write out. You don't have to know how these things go together. But what you do need to do is you need to know honest and you need to write out these are the things that are going on. Sometimes I think it's helpful to be able to keep a note open on your phone and just be adding to it. So as you go through time and you're like, oh, you know what? When I wake up in the morning, I don't want to ever feel rested. Add that to the note. And you just keep this list going over a couple of days, maybe even over a couple of weeks as the things that you are experiencing that are just not probably who God has created you to be and how a healthy body and mind would be functioning.
Speaker 1 00:09:54 And so the second step is that after we admit, then we want to begin to draw attention to what this is. One of our greatest tools in counseling is that we have the desire and the opportunity to try to separate ourselves out. When you bring me your story and you were overwhelmed in it and you can't see what's going on, my job is to stay outside of your story, not to be sucked into your story, but to be able to give you an observational standpoint to the information that you're giving me, but this is actually one of the greatest tools that we can use in our own understanding of our own hearts is to be able to take the time, to try to look at this from a third-person perspective.
Speaker 2 00:10:33 If you were looking
Speaker 1 00:10:34 At our friend who was describing these circumstances to you, what would you say to them? What would you see is going on? I remember after I had my third child and I was just so overwhelmed at so many different times, and I just wrote out all of the things that my mind and my body and my soul were experiencing. And I felt like an idiot because here I am a therapist and I'm looking at almost as if I wrote the diagnostic criteria, almost an alphabetical order for postpartum depression. But as I was living in those moments, it was so hard. Even for me, who's a therapist to understand how these pieces all came together. So for me to make that list and admit what was going on and then draw attention to it, stepping outside of it as a third party observer, it immediately gave me the opportunity to being able to look at this from a very different perspective.
Speaker 1 00:11:34 And then, yeah, it gave me the opportunity and the ability to go to the third step, which is to ask around, do you see this going on in my story? Do you see that? Sometimes? Cause sometimes when I, you asked me to decide what restaurant I want to eat at, I'm very confused and it's extremely overwhelming for me. Do you see me get flooded? Do you see my mind kind of go into a giant fog? And there's two places that we continually invite destruction into our stories. And that is when we do not ask around and we keep things in the dark and we stay alone in them. We talked about that a little bit in our developing a feedback system talk, but again, here it is. If we begin to admit these things, we begin to draw attention to it. We begin to see how this is all looking together and we don't ask for help. We don't solicit others to give us their feedback. And we don't tell them what it is that we are experiencing. We stay alone and we stay in the dark and those are the ingredients for inviting us so much further destruction and darkness and feelings of being stuck into our story.
Speaker 1 00:12:50 One of the things I also want to encourage you on is that we don't need the affirmation of other people to tell us that they agree with us, that they can see that sometimes we get lost in the brain fog.
Speaker 2 00:13:04 It's helpful. It's life-giving, but we don't need that. So if you
Speaker 1 00:13:10 Feel that and you understand that, I want you to feel empowered to go ahead and make the next right move and do the next right thing that you need to do in order to get the help that you know that you need. And so our fourth step is that after we've admitted, after we've kind of drawn attention to this, looked at it from a third party observational standpoint, we've began to ask around both, to tell people and ask them about our stories. Then we want to lean in, we've talked about this before, but if we began to see on our dashboard of our car, then an indicator light went on and then we didn't lean in move towards it and do something about it.
Speaker 2 00:13:52 Well, again,
Speaker 1 00:13:53 We're just inviting further destruction to our car engine, right? Because that indicator light is telling us something's not okay, but if I just put that paper over it, and if I just ignore it, it's not helpful. So our next step is that we lean in, we begin to take the next steps that we need to be able to get help. And I believe with my whole heart, that as we begin to look at, when do I need help? It can be any time it can be when it's in a tendency, it began can be when it's just a small little hurt that we have going on, but we know we need help. When we begin to see that it is absolutely impacting our daily experience and interfering with that. When we meet that diagnostic criteria, when we begin to admit and write these things down and draw attention.
Speaker 1 00:14:45 So we lean in and way we get help, we can ask our pastors, we can ask a small group leaders. We can ask our spouses, we can ask our friends. We can look out counselors and therapists in our area that have the same common ground and values as we have, and we can ask for help. And so if that is something that you find yourself, you've been listening to our conversation today, actually I'm at a point where I need help. My hope for you is that you will do the very hard thing that you will find. I guarantee you very rewarding to ask for help. And sometimes you don't find the perfect person to help you on the first try and that's okay. Sometimes it takes going to a second counselor, a third therapist talking to another pastor, talking to another friend until you get what you need. Because one of my greatest desires is that we are rising up a generation of people who get what they need. That when you begin to understand, I need something and I need help. You may not know how to ask for it directly because your mind still might be spinning, but you seek to get what you need and you do not stop until you get what that is. So I hope that our conversation today has been helpful for you to understand what your next step
Speaker 0 00:16:13 Is in getting help. I pray that you had the courage to take that step, but until next time, press on.
