Many people struggle with anxiety, burnout, irritability, or emotional exhaustion despite having successful careers, healthy relationships, and active lifestyles. This article explores the hidden pressure to be well, how modern ideas about wellness shape our understanding of mental health, and why therapy, all types, involves the change in our orientation toward experience rather than simply fixing symptoms.
“I Have Nothing to Complain About, but I have everything to complain about”
There is the you of you just doing your life. You work. You take care of your family. You exercise. You get outside. You have friends. Overall, you’re doing what you are supposed to. You are happy generally, but specifically…well…
Then there is another you. Life is a chore. Sleep is off and on, and never totally restful. A thread of irritation is always close by, just waiting. Inside, it’s not really good. You control it pretty good, but sometimes people notice and comment, sometimes humorous, sometimes concerned.
For many people, the struggle isn’t just feeling bad. It’s feeling bad when they think they should feel good.
It might seem odd to hear from the mental health clinician that much of our problems are about the meaning of what is happening, how we interpret things, almost like I could be blaming you for your problems. Indeed, there is a saying, though, something about 90% of our life is our attitude toward life and what we bring to it, and 10% is what is given to us.
Yes. Often it is our attitude that shapes our lives.
…But if you know my blogging at all, I don’t write about platitudes or give you simple fix-it strategies. I offer you a way to agency by helping you to use your abilities, have information and perspective which draw from your innate intelligence, both your mind and body, as well as your soul.
You are the containment of all problems and solutions because you are actively mattering.
Why Feeling Bad When You “Should” Feel Good Creates Shame
When do I seek help for my mental health?
When I feel there is something going on that my ways have not been successful at managing.
Consider what is implied in that action.
- I should be healthy.
- I should be taking care of myself.
- I should be managing stress effectively.
- I should be thriving.
It is quite ironic when you think about it, and most people don’t want to think about it.
Should I ?
or Am I ?
The very act of getting to the point where I would want help with my mental health is the point where I admit that I am living up to standards that I was not involved in making for myself. When I reach out, I am effectively saying that you know more than me about me.
Yes. It is very ironic.
Since, I am effectively expressing that I know that you know more than me than what I know.
That sounds like an unrecognized problem, experienced, but unnoticed.
When these expectations become internalized, emotional struggles can feel like personal failures rather than normal human experiences. And when this is fully cognized such that my bodily and somatic experience is imposed upon by this external judgment, we can justly say that I am not well.
As we ponder deeper, we begin to gain a view into the way that the idea of mental health assumes many aspects and qualities that are not being elucidated.
For example, I am not saying that people should just get over themselves, have some self-esteem, some self-confidence, and so on. Rather, I am suggesting that there are types of mental health that our current way of understanding is obscuring. As I have talked about in another post, the idea that there is a common experience of anxiety, for example, is, on one hand, a misnomer for the sake of helping the psychiatrists in determining which drugs to administer, and on the other hand, a failure of discernment within experience.
When you think about this for more than a couple seconds, the problem is exactly where the blame should be placed. Either we blame it on a physiology that is wrong, or we blame it on the person who is not taking responsibility for themselves.
This assumption of guilt within knowledge, that there needs to be an accounting and a compensation for the victim, is a theme that was taken up throughout the 20th century in every corner of philosophy. But the experience of guilt without a recognized reason, without something to be guilty of, is, for all purposes, the experience of shame.
But …
As Yoda said….there is another option…
How Modern Psychological Frameworks of Mental Health Shape Experience
What I call the modern, or conventional method upholds an idea as the criterion for all things. I call this “big idea” reality. This Big Idea gives people a way to understand themselves in reality, which together constitutes reality, the person in reality. It is not wrong, it is not bad, but it has repercussions.
These repercussions constitute the entirety of mental health as we know it as a problem. Mental Health Philosophy describes what must be the case when we are involved with mental problems; these problems are psychological..
But that is not the direct topic of this post.
We are talking about how Wellness might be involved with problems of mental health. From a clinical standpoint, the modern method is assumed not to be merely one “container”; on the contrary, it is assumed to be the only container for experience. What this means is that typically people just encounter reality as reality and consider any thought about something outside of reality to be a fantasy, irrational, or not true.
The way we work with problems of mental health is to move people into an effective space where this real container, which is to say the way that people are experiencing and knowing about their problem such that it is a problem, is experienced as but one container.
The words we use for this do not matter very much in Mental Health Philosophy because MHP is not posing a new or better way to fix problems. In Cognitive therapy we might call it a “core belief” while in Gestalt Therapy we might call it a “frame” and in Transpersonal therapy we could call it “misidentification”. Often the notion of Wellness appears to use psychological health as its criterion, which then places mental health as a goal, or a condition of relative wellness. What we are not noticing here, though, is that mental health is being used in a particular way, whereas other types of mental health might involve the biological, or constitutional manifestations, what was once called endogenous, physiological damage or irregularity, at one time called exogenous, or trauma, what was called psychogenic. The point here is that whether we use any one of those terms depends on what we are actually, or assume to be, referring to. We might start to understand how people can develop mental issues when we see that the terms we are using to convey some sort of understanding are themselves very often not very specific, if not inherently confused.
What kind of experience and hope for getting better would a person using these terms to understand themselves and their experience have when they are referring to these terms as though they were actually identifying something sure?
The Colorado Wall: The Pressure to Appear Well in Colorado Culture
In places where outdoor activity, fitness, and self-improvement are highly valued, such as in Colorado, many people learn to present a version of themselves that appears healthy and capable. Behind that wall of expectation and assumption might be:
- Anxiety
- Burnout
- Loneliness
- Relationship struggles
- Grief
- Trauma
The pressure isn’t simply to feel better. It’s to look like you’re already doing fine. Why? How could such good ideas, i.e., of fitness, and self-improvement, say, hold such potential to not be recognized? Oddly, if they are being recognized, then we can very well ask into how is the way they are being recognized contributing to the problems?
This is the question informing the whole person.
We come up against the wall of the modern method which implicitly tells a person they are not simply doing something wrong, but that their experience of wrong, or not being well, is wrong. Brene Brown, a big name in emotions, trauma and self-compassion, calls this kind of experience shame. We might think of shame as a sort of externally imposed idea of internal incompatibility; it could be conflict, but it is more likely a reflection of an ideological consistency.
Again, there is a huge irony sticking its head out here. The typical criteria that we are using to understand our own experience is failing. Of course, there is nothing wrong with using various psychological strategies to gain motivation toward some goal, and indeed we could call this kind of goal based around motivation as Wellness, but it is not necessarily to be equated with having mental health, that is, unless one is already oriented upon their life, knowledge, and experience in this way. This kind of intelligent discernment of experience is not regularly available because most often the discussion is couched in an argument about what people are supposed to be, what qualities of one’s thinking and activities one should undertake, and that everyone hearing this should be oriented in mental health and wellness in this way or they are wrong.
How are people supposed to be well at all amidst such a cacophony of self-proclaimed and institutionally supported experts?
It is a wall of ideas against which the person is supposed to “know better” by referring their mental health. The person is put in a, here is the philosophical term, a priori position of already being vulnerable to being shamed by the mere fact of the way they are supposed to understand their experience.
When Self-Care Isn’t Solving the Problem
Hiking, exercise, meditation apps, podcasts, journaling, better sleep habits…
These can be incredibly helpful.
But sometimes the issue isn’t a lack of coping skills. Sometimes there’s something deeper asking for attention. It is a simple thing to notice; how we go about becoming trapped in cycles is itself evidence of the 20th century Existentialist explanation; we reject freedom.
Common internal messages of the failure of the way we understand our experience are:
- “Other people have it worse.”
- “I just need to push through.”
- “I don’t have a real reason to be struggling.”
These beliefs can often create shame, but they are also evidence of shame occurring already. Of course there are many ways to address this self-talk, from directly challenging or reframing them in a greater perspective, to understanding that they are reflecting behaviors that are trying to help, but the assumption underneath is that something is wrong when I have a certain kind of experience.
Self-care skills sometimes don’t get into these levels of understanding because, often enough, the way we are trying to apply skills is upon the idea that something is wrong. It reminds and reifies that something is wrong with me.
Why Mental Health Is About Orientation More Than Solutions
Wellness and mental health are like sweetness and oranges. The type or amount of sweetness is one of taste, not of quality, of preference, less of standards. However, the argument over which tastes should be preferred is not telling us much about mental health unless I already think something is wrong and I need a comparison. So it is. Needing a comparison nor having a standard of comparison is not the main issue. It is not a question of external standards of modern quality because the standard is already being enacted as the person herself. The question of mental health is thus one of orientation because it does not matter what therapeutic intervention poses of itself.
What matters is how the person and the theory are constituting themselves such that the intervention has sense in the relationship.
Every intervention functions the same way but using different terms to situate the elements in conceptual space. Each offers a containment that is different than the modern ideological reality, but in that they are all dynamic acts of containment, they do not challenge the modern method more than constitute it. This is why orientation is the central issue of mental health, and not the particular argument the theory makes. Another way of saying this is the therapeutic change that is effective for solving the problem is a change in the way one understands change itself.
What Therapy Can Offer
Good therapy isn’t about convincing you that your life is worse than it is, and although help can arrive by convincing you it is better, you would not be able to be convinced if it was not already within you.
It’s about helping you understand what’s happening in that it is understood as a problem.
You don’t need to justify your pain. The pain is lessened or resolved when it is properly understood and experienced.
The proper way is one’s own way.
You only need to become curious about it.
Possibility Over Probability
You can live a beautiful life and still experience struggle.
You can have a good life and still feel stuck.
You can be grateful and hurting at the same time.
The goal isn’t to become a perfectly well person.
The goal is to become a more fully human one.
You can do this because that is what life is. The argument inside of you about how well you are is not as significant as that you are having it.
The modern method would want to know that you should not be living the way you are:
To be oriented in the modern method is to be sure There must be a problem that is very bad!!
By contrast:
The way you do you is the way you Be that is distinctly you with no problem you cannot successfully navigate.
Because you are, indeed, mattering.
Orientation upon things, not argument over things, is the significance of mental health.
> > > Frequently Asked Questions
Why do I feel unhappy when my life seems good?
Many people experience emotional distress despite external success. The conflict often comes from expectations about how they should feel.
Can therapy help if I don’t have a major mental illness?
Yes. Therapy can help people explore burnout, anxiety, shame, meaning, and patterns of experience that are difficult to understand alone.
What is the difference between wellness and mental health?
Wellness often refers to skills, practices and goals, while mental health concerns how a person experiences themselves, others, and the world in the process of those goals.