What little things do you find useful? Looking over the list below, a few of them work for me, time with people who care about me, humor, and finding things I can do or look forward to are among the ways I try to find the light when things look dark to me. Some others aren’t that helpful to me often. I know people who swear by some of those, though.
Whatever your light is, please keep your eyes out for it.
Since I’m not well-suited to giving recommendations right now, do you love any of the podcasts on the list I linked? If not, what mental health podcasts do you love?
Maybe, instead of blaming people for overreacting, we should consider for a moment why they do not feel safe. And instead of beating ourselves up for overreacting, we consider how to ground ourselves and remind ourselves of our safety when the need arises.
As survivors, our healing depends on our ability to create a life where we feel safe. That means both being in a safe place and learning to recognize that safety to get out of this constant survival mode. That mode is not sustainable. It was never meant to be a constant state of being.
I stumbled across this review from Verushka on Twitter yesterday. (Hey, it’s still good for something, sometimes!) Her description got my attention, and I thought it might also interest some of you:
What is this about?
Burn out; the different types — from carers to COVID and more. And some straightforward advice you probably already know, but might need a reminder of. I know I did.
What else is this about?
Mental health in today’s COVID, online, WFH world.
The bad news, however, might be that almost everyone does this. So instead of connecting with each other, we are each stressing over all the things we may have done wrong when we interacted. Which isn’t great. That makes it harder to connect with other people, which has a ton of negative effects on our mental health.
We’ve spent so much time looking at lists like this one, looking for the bad people, and that is absolutely part of abuse prevention. Still, we’ve missed the boat on what might be the most significant tool in our prevention toolkit, taking the target off kids by connecting with them as parents and with other trusted adults—helping them be less vulnerable.
Kids who don’t have secrets make terrible targets for abusers. Kids with support and secure relationships aren’t easily manipulated and aren’t too eager to please adults.
We need our kids to be more of that, starting with having close relationships with the safe adults in their lives.
