Last week, I wrote about how important friendship is to our well-being and how terrible most of us are about making and keeping friends. Given that, I thought I would also share this list of recommended books. If you have other recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments!
Let’s agree that politics, social media, racism, poverty, environmental disasters, and even a pandemic have caused some level of mental health harm to society, but let’s also consider that the underlying reason is that we have simply stopped being as kind as we used to be.
We all have different reasons for downplaying our accomplishments. Many people don’t take the time to recognize their wins, whether due to imposter syndrome, a well-intentioned but overly focused attempt at humility, a lack of self-worth, or perfectionism.
This is a problem. When we can’t see our accomplishments, the only thing left is seeing our failures. We get a warped sense of ourselves when we only see our failures. We carry that warped sense of ourselves into the world and interact with others based on a mindset that sees only failure. That impacts our relationships and work, becoming just another failure point.
What if we took an honest look at the most important people in our lives and dedicated ourselves to making them feel like the matter? What would that require of us? Can we honestly say it is too much to ask?
The article below describes how this can happen, mostly focused on several factors. One, things change. The family’s circumstances change over the years, your parents change over the years, and so an older or younger sibling might have been raised differently than we were. Also, we are different. Some kids’ personalities mesh differently with their parents compared to their siblings. That’s all pretty normal.
I want to talk about childhood abuse, especially why it can seem like our siblings don’t understand when we tell them about our abuse. One of the things that becomes clear as you read the link is that kids might grow up in the same biological family but not necessarily in the same circumstances.
What we see there is that mental health problems can create debt. When we cannot work, our healthcare costs skyrocket, and we can find ourselves in a poor financial situation. That poor financial situation creates more stress and emotional labor, contributing to mental health issues.
Whether the mental health problem or financial struggle came first doesn’t matter. Once we are in the cycle, it will continue round and round.
That’s what cycles do.
