3 Mind Management Principles That Helped Me Through a Family Crisis
When difficult times hit, I was thankful I had already learned about and practiced mind management.
My memoir, Letting Go: How a Family Crisis Brought Clarity and Authenticity, chronicles a year in our family’s life when three things happen: our kids struggle with depression and anxiety, some of them come out as LGBTQ, and I reconcile that with my religion. Our third child, Brooke, attempted suicide and was in an inpatient behavioral health unit for five days and then an outpatient, or “day treatment,” program for six weeks.
This was certainly not how I expected my life to go. Everyone has ideas about how their children and their lives will look, but mine were even more narrowly defined because I was part of a high-demand, conservative Christian religion. My church’s prescribed lifestyle and personal choices were billed as the only way to happiness. At the time of our family crisis, I was already having doubts about and frustrations with the church, and within a year of Brooke’s hospitalization, I left the church altogether.
Thankfully, I had been somewhat prepared for these challenges. Two years before, I had joined a life coach program that taught a whole new approach to dealing with problems. My coach, whom I’ll call Liz, had been trained at The Life Coach School, where she learned the Model and many other mind management tools to help clients see reality more clearly and let go of painful thoughts.
There are three concepts I learned in Liz’s program that helped me through the difficult times our family faced.
1. It’s all a story.
The mind management skills I had learned from Liz had prepared me to let go of one story and embrace a different one. I knew that my brain gets ideas about how the world should work or what my life should look like, and that sometimes holding on to those ideas can cause me pain. I have learned how to redirect my mind to a new thought, even before I have a lot of reasons to accept the new idea. In fact, one of my favorites of Liz’s teachings was “believing things I don’t have much evidence for makes me mentally stronger.” That concept made sense to me, and I had worked to create a habit of identifying my stories and letting them go.
I have learned how to redirect my mind to a new thought, even before I have a lot of reasons to accept the new idea.
When Brooke came out as non-binary, I realized I had thoughts and stories about gender and how it should look. I was fortunate to be able to quickly see that these were just made-up ideas. Gender norms are a construct our society created. Somewhere along the way it was decided that girls and boys must look and act a certain way, that there’s nothing in between the two polarities, and that it’s wrong to look or act differently than society’s (or my church’s) definitions. These views had been held for a long time, but that did not mean they were true, real, or right. We could cling to them and continue to marginalize large groups of people who exist outside those norms, or we could see our notions for what they are: false paradigms that we had bought into.
I asked myself, what’s wrong with changing? Why do we hold on to these outmoded opinions? It seemed to me there is no danger in letting these beliefs go, no harm to society. In fact, the opposite would happen, more members of our community could live happy, productive lives, free from discrimination and prejudice. Many of our constructs are based in fear, and I could see that people were afraid of this change in thinking.
Thankfully, most of secular society has accepted gay people and the concept of gay marriage. Now we have a new hurdle: recognizing and supporting transgender individuals and those with genders outside of the binary. These new and different ways of being feel scary because we’re not used to them. But the sooner we can put down our defenses and embrace them, the happier we will be.
2. How can I be the hero of this story and not the victim?
Liz taught me to ask this question whenever I was facing a challenging situation. I returned to this query again and again, and the answers lifted and sustained me. It would be easy to think of myself as a victim, to ask “why me?” when faced with the mental health struggles of our family. But I liked to turn it around and ask, “why not me?” Who else could do it as well as me? I was made for this. I’ve got this.
Thinking about how I’m the hero directs my brain toward reasons I am capable of handling this instead of focusing on how hard it is. I had knowledge and experience with mental health systems and treatments. I had my husband, Bryan, to help navigate the doctors and medications. We had a strong foundation as a close, loving family. I remain calm in difficult situations and contemplate what I do and say before acting. Seeing myself as the hero of the story was comforting and motivating.
3. Negative thoughts and painful emotions are a normal part of being human.
I used to think that feeling any negative emotion meant there was something wrong with me or my life. Before joining Liz’s program, I constantly compared my life to other people’s and concluded that mine came up short. On one hand, I felt cheated and bitter that I didn’t have what others had, but on the other hand, I felt guilty for being unhappy because I had so much.
It was such a relief to learn that these thoughts and emotions are normal and expected. No matter what our circumstances, our default mind finds something wrong with us and our lives. In an effort to keep us safe and to make sure we have what we need, our brain insists on comparison to others’, self-criticism, and worry about what others think of us. Unfortunately, all this usually causes us pain.
No matter what our circumstances, our default mind finds something wrong with us and our lives.
As part of Liz’s program, I got to listen in when others were being coached. Hearing other people talk about their problems convinced me that we all create painful emotions for ourselves. There isn’t a way of being or a path in life that prevents experiencing difficult feelings.
As we went through Brooke’s mental health crisis and tried to help them, I experienced a lot of challenging emotions. Luckily, I didn’t overreact to them. In the past, I might have berated myself for being negative or thought that I would feel down forever. But now I knew that no one is immune to life’s difficulties and that resisting the hardships just makes them worse. One of my mantras during this time was “This is what it’s like to be human.”
Liz’s wise teachings were in line with concepts from Buddhism: there will be pain in life that cannot be avoided, but when we resist hard times, we add on a layer of unnecessary suffering. On the other hand, if we put down our defenses and allow ourselves to feel the pain and experience the difficulty, we actually feel more alive, and the discomfort passes through us instead of getting stuck inside of us.
Getting through that challenging year wasn’t easy, but because of my work with Liz, I had many tools to help me manage the situation. If I hadn’t joined the life coaching program, I would have seen Brooke’s mental health problems as an indication of something wrong with me or something wrong with my life. Fortunately, I had done the work and learned how to manage my mind, so I was able to respond with peace and acceptance. I had also improved at identifying my stories more quickly and loosening my grip on them. I had trained myself to identify how I was the hero of the story and not the victim. And I recognized that painful emotions were part of the human experience. I had the skills to allow the discomfort and move through it instead of resisting it and letting it fester inside.
Try this on: “Believing things I don’t have much evidence for makes me mentally stronger.”
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