Spouse

  • Some Conversations Are Easier Online

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I have understood this for a long time. I can write here without having to see anyone react immediately when they read it. I can see their reaction when I tell someone about being abused in person. I can watch their facial expressions and body language. I can see every bit of their discomfort, and their signs of dismissal cut me. If you don’t think telling someone in person that you need their help isn’t scary, I can only assume that is because you’ve never done it.

    So when you see someone share something on social media about their mental health, and your response is to wonder why they didn’t just talk to you about it, remember how much harder that is. Maybe they aren’t ready yet, or you just haven’t done enough to earn that trust. Consider how many people in your life may be dealing with very difficult things they just haven’t told anyone about yet.

  • Concentric Circles of Trauma

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    No, the easiest way to break up those circles, as any kid who threw rocks into the water can tell you, is to throw another rock and create new concentric circles starting from a different location.

    In my metaphor about the trauma, I wonder what those other rocks could be. Mental health treatment? Care and support from family and friends? The elimination of stigma attached to trauma?

    How about instead of ignoring the circles, we started throwing some more useful rocks and disrupting the cycles of trauma that we see repeated over and over again in those circles?

  • Running on Fumes

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    I heard someone on the radio use this phrase to describe herself as we were out grabbing a few last-minute items to assist with riding out Hurricane Ida. She was talking about evacuating her home in New Orleans at 10:30 last night, driving to Alabama to seek shelter, and then doing the show remotely from there.

    Here, we aren’t in as much of a need to evacuate, we are further from the coast and the storm surge, but it’s still going to be a long, dangerous couple of days. So, we are spending a lot of time, and both mental and physical energy, preparing to possibly be without power, for needing to leave if the house is damaged, and so forth. It’s a lot. And that is on top of all the mental energy necessary to deal with large COVID outbreaks we’ve had in recent weeks, all of the recent events in world news, and the various personal and professional challenges that we are also dealing with.

    Running on fumes is a really good description of how I think most of the entire state feels today, and yet, there’s a storm coming that we are all going to have to deal with, while everything else just continues on as well.

  • Mental Illness as Scapegoat – Not Every Poor Behavior is Mental Illness

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 6 minutes

    I’ve been thinking about this topic for awhile now. Some of it has been brought on by hearing many of the comments about the Joker movie, some by the way people react to violence, and even some on the way political discussions tend to take place in the US these days. It all came together…