Talking about building emotional resilience

You have been incredibly resilient @Appleblossom .

I am so glad to have met you here, and now we are in the same state I think of you very often. Love zoos too .....

❤️

Summarising thoughts on Point 4 (including reflections from earlier postings)

@Faith-and-Hope talked about the difficulty in bridging and the need to sit with feelings. Due to various reasons she is not able to keep a gratitude diary.

@Appleblossom previously mentioned that she consciously journed about the positives and it really did help.

@Shaz51 said that Mr Shaz loves the difference between the positive vibes at her place vs the negative vibes at the "outlaws' and how he had been knocked down with words and that they often do not think before they speak. Shaz has contemplated starting a gratitude journal.

@Ali11 joined in talking about taking time to pause and @Faith-and-Hope gave practical tips in that regard.

@Former-Member mentioned that her garden diary and that changing her focus from the negative to the positive has helped her.

The next step is tip 5: Journal about the difficult times

1. Write 15 minutes for 3-4 days about your painful feelings.
2. Ask questions to explore the emotions more.

For me this tip represents a bit of a mine field, particularly for those who have gone through deep trauma and I would again put a reminder out there that self-help can be a good starting point but is not often not adequate for treating emotional wounds and professional help may be necessary.

I bear in mind what @Appleblossom wrote earlier:

"I have not journalled about the negative ones yet. I wrote a few brief poems and I began with a therapist who was supposed to be into narrative therapy. Every now and then I attempt it and have lots of partial pieces of writing. No longer sure what I want to say and I dont want to retraumatise myself, so I am mostly being active and positive, but maybe like your quote about realism, it best doing brief limited memory trips."

The researcher Courtney Ackerman has found a lot of evidence that shows journaling has been proven effective in the treatment of mild depression and anxiety and in complementing other forms of therapy for those with major depression. She quotes the psychologist Barbara Markway, “There’s simply no better way to learn about your thought processes than to write them down.” and “to address our problematic thought patterns, we first have to actually know what they are! Journaling is instrumental in helping us identify our negative automatic self-talk and get to the root of our anxiety”. Courtney mentions that journaling can also help manage stress in a number of ways by:

• Decreasing symptoms of various health conditions
• Improving your cognitive functioning.
• Strengthening your immune system.
• Examining your thoughts and shifting your perspective.
• Reducing rumination and promoting action.
• Planning out your options and considering multiple outcomes of a situation (Scott, 2018).

I think when looking at building our emotional resilience that it is important to examine our negative thoughts and throughout our discussions, contributors have mentioned some of these and I think the forum in general has been a place where we have felt the freedom to do this and is a form of journaling; I know I have found it helpful to write down my feelings here.

I would like to highlight that the tip was time limited

... 15 mins for 3-4 days ...

Nisha says once you have written, ask yourself these questions:

1) What is it that upset me so much?

2) How can I improve my situation?

3) What is the learning I get out of this?

Thanks @Former-Member

I will keep the idea of limiting the time of negative journalling.

Coincidentally ... ?? I have started journalling negative stuff today. instead of being on the forum. First time this year.

Great tips as always @Former-Member, and good to hear you're trying to write out some of those negative thoughts @Appleblossom! How are you finding it so far?

@Former-Member, will be back to read and write

There was not so much discussion around Tip 5 of journaling the negatives a lot having been mentioned in previous discussions but @Appleblossom said she had recommenced journaling the negative.

@Former-Member pointed out that a lot of the participants in the forum informally journal the negative.

Moving on to the second to last suggestion we come to Tip 6: Build social connections

1. Connect to people who care about you at least once in 3 weeks
2. Connections can be face-face or over phone or social networks

Caring for someone with mental illness can be socially isolating for many reasons including time demands, stigma and misunderstanding of our loved one’s behaviours, our own mental exhaustion, not feeling brave enough to venture out on our own, not having a hobby, not wanting to leave our loved one’s home alone and the list goes on. All of a sudden we can find ourselves bereft of friendships and feeling housebound.

There are many studies that show the mental and physical health benefits of having meaningful connections within groups. Loss of social connections has been identified as a public health issue and a notable example of the health benefits of being connected provides is well documented in relation to the Men’s shed movement which was started here in Australia for blokes to meet each other and chat whilst working on various projects.1

There are so many social groups available even in the small country town where I live including various sports, a pony club, walking club, bowls, line dancing, gardening and craft groups (quilting, take your own). There are plenty of churches and opportunity to volunteer with service groups (Rotary/Lions), the SES, CFA, two op shops. museums and more. There is a community house and regional health service who put on low cost/no cost classes and weekly talks one can attend, the library also has free classes on various topics such as using electronic tablets, mobile phones etc. Being connected does not necessarily mean joining an organised community group per se, where I lived many years ago, I got together fortnightly with a few friends and we chatted as we worked on our own craft projects, mine was knitting and at that stage I used to knit myself a new jumper each year. When we moved from there, in our new location, I made a friend and we would meet on my rostered day off once a month and would head out for the day, visiting places of interest, sometimes joining a bus trip, occasionally it would be just lunch out, often trying out different cafes.

Whilst online connections are helpful, I believe they are not a substitute for face to face and group connections and that we should not neglect the latter which, if I am reading correctly, appear to confer the greatest benefit.

In a recently published article by Saeri et al found that “Social connectedness was found to be a stronger and more consistent predictor of mental health year-on-year than mental health was of social connectedness.” They found social connectedness to be both a protective and curative factor in mental health, reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression.2 Given that as carers we are at risk of depression, building and maintaining connections is so very important.

References

1. https://australia-explained.com.au/history/mens-sheds

2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0004867417723990