How do you resolve emotional baggage from struggling with mental illness?
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- Опубліковано 8 жов 2022
- Years of struggling with mental illness can leave us carrying around some baggage. But trying to clean away those experiences from the past can quickly get us trapped in the same old compulsive patterns.
For stories of real baggage and emotions, check out my mental health and travel blog: www.themindfulfieldguide.com
For working on recovery skills, grab my book, YOU ARE NOT A ROCK, wherever books are sold, like here on Amazon: bit.ly/youarenotarock
(It's called THE MIND WORKOUT in the UK and Australia/New Zealand, DAS MIND-WORKOUT in Deutsch, ENTRENA TU MENTE en español)
Learn more about what I do here: www.markfreeman.ca
Connect here:
Twitter: / thepathtochange
Instagram: / markwfreeman
I have been recovered for many years now and I’d just like to say that Marks videos helped me immensely when I was stuck on my ocd mouse wheel. I can honestly say recovery is possible no matter how bad your ocd is. Keep up the good work mate! From 🇦🇺 ✌🏼
thank you.
It was 11 years ago when I thought I was going insane with mental obsessions and compulsions and it was the darkest time of my life. I didn’t even know anything about OCD until I found your videos. Changed my life, and every now and then when ocd rears its head, I come back to these videos. Thanks Mark!
Thanks for sharing that, Matt! It's great to hear how you've taken these skills on and turned them into action in your life. I hope they continue to be useful on the journey.
I want you to know how much you have helped me with my mental health and how you have improved my quality of life- over the last 10 years. I always come back to your videos because you speak to me in ways nobody else has. Thank you from the bottom of my heart Mark. Sending you all of the love and blessings in the world. ❤
Thank you for the kind words, Emily. It's wonderful to hear these videos have been useful supports on your journeys. Enjoy the steps ahead! :)
The alpacas have to be the best part hahah you’re the best Mark
They are the best part!
The humorous side of me really loves when you hit the suitcase with the towel. Like, you aren't even cleaning it anymore. You're just frustrated. So relatable.
But we hope it will clean it somehow!
Self compassion is still something I'm working on, especially about the past! Being mindful of the moment is also a very useful tool, but again one I'm still practicing to get better at!
Accepting those experiences and carrying them around with me, I think is the biggest hurdle for me right now. Getting over the flinch reaction to talking about them, thinking about them and just letting them be there is a hard one, especially when I fear stuff happening again! But, again, I am actively trying to just let it all be there while I do things.
Self compassion is not an easy practice, but even when we struggle to practice, it is a good practice.
Just started reading your book and one thing that's struck me straight away is what you said that we are not rocks we are human so it's normal to feel pain and anxiety in life that I did not really think about before and that we should not flee from it. All this time I had tried to avoid bad feelings which in turn made me feel more of it. Looking forward to read the rest of the book. Thanks for everything you do great help.
Literally the only dude on UA-cam talking about the “collateral damage” from the mental illness.
Sometimes it’s easier to stay mentally unwell than face these compounded.
It's definitely always more difficult to keep the compulsions in our lives.
Thank you for making this video! Can you please make a one about binge eating/food addiction and the bad relationship with food
Mark, you are a hero !
Great stuff Mark! Any chance of making a video on the difference between Alpacas and Llamas? I need certainty😅
It's very important to understand!
Brilliant!
Just want to leave some love and say what an incredible video this is Mark! You are so amazing and I love the creativity. Thank you
God Bless you mark.
nice one Mark!
Mark can you please make a video on how to express anger in healthy way because I recently read that we should let our anger express in assertive way. The problem with me is I use to express my anger in aggressive way and now after controlling my anger for a long period of time I do fear if i express my anger it may get aggresive so now i am stuck in how to do that in most healthy way.
Great video! Great message! Great acting in the background! ❤️
Thanks for watching!
I think (1) it can be helpful to process feelings associated with negative past experiences when they arise (2) art writing and creativity in general are good ways to process and express pain (3) as well as talking with friends and family and other forms of support
Thank you for this
:)
Thank you, Mark.
:)
@@everybodyhasabrain Would you be willing to answer the question I posted on the last brain support video? Or could I email you it? I'd be happy to pay you for your time. Sorry, I wasn't sure if you saw it and just didn't want to answer. If you don't want to, that's ok. Thanks.
Oscar nomination for the guy on the left :)
He's trying hard for a daytime Emmy!
How do you live with traumatazing information that happenend to your significant other /family ? How do you cope with that in your mind and accept it ? It gives me anxiety to this since I didn't have power to stop it and Im forced to accept it.
oh i get it, the baggage is the suit case. i see what you did there.
23kgs of emotions in there.
Hello Mark, thank you for uploading your videos they are very helpful. I had one questions. I realize that most of my intrusive thoughts happen when I am not being true to myself. I have a hard time saying no, how can I start practicing just saying no? This is a huge issue for me. When I say no I feel like I’m a bad person.
Hey Mark I wanted to ask a question. Can't overcoming any anxiety disorder/OCD be summed up to just not responding/reacting to anxiety/uncertainty? Of course this is easier said then done but is this not a sufficient enough understanding of what to do? Is there really a need to dig further and try to find out root causes or your beliefs fueling the responses or anything like that? Thank you for your videos btw.
Hi your videos are very helpful..can you please make a video on how to lose the fear of physcial symptoms..thanks in advance.
It can really help to see that fear of anything is going to be the same. It's still going to involve cutting out the compulsions. If you're checking for physical symptoms, avoiding things, planning around them, trying to control the possibility of them coming up, it'll be useful to see that's not about the fear, that's about the compulsions. The compulsions are what fuel the fear. It can feel like it's the other way around--that we do the compulsions as a reaction to the fear--but for getting over that stuff, it was useful to recognize that my compulsions were teaching the brain to throw up the physical symptoms, just like any addiction.
@@everybodyhasabrain a video on that and how to rid of the compulsiveness would be great
@@wbkbeats8724 All of my videos are on how to cut out compulsions. There's over 100 only on that topic.
@@everybodyhasabrain Thank you so much..keep rocking
For me recently ocd has been taking control of my life and that my brain is telling me that all of the compulsions that I have ignored or not done in the right way. I need to spend a week finishing all of them until I have done them all. Then and only then I can enjoy my life and be happy. And when I try to do my rituals, either another thought comes in my head at the time I am ritualizing or I would have to repeat them or sometimes when I'm half done with the pile of compulsions they would start to pile up again. And I would have to do it all over again and this is tearing me apart. Do you have any advice on this or a video?
The past is like the solicitor who keeps showing up at your door. He's not invited and you don't want what he's selling.
We can thank him for stopping by.
Hi mark, can you make a video on anhedonia, which feels like we feel no emotions and only maybe anxiety, sometikes even faking emotions in social situations.
From what you've shared, I'd instead look at cutting out compulsions around checking and judging feelings. It helped me to recognize that checking for a feeling works just like somebody with contamination OCD checking if they feel clean enough: the more they check and try to chase that feeling, the less they'll get it. They'll be convinced they need to do more and more to try to get the feeling they want, whatever that clean, right feeling is to them. But they'll just get more and more of the dirty, wrong feeling.
Hey Mark. I have a question about HOCD because i stuck here. My biggest value is honesty in this life. So i dont want to lie myself, my loved ones etc. This is why i want to be %100 sure about my sexuality. Wanna date with someone, have family and live my life fully without what if’s and maybes while being me. How do you approach ?
I don't understand what you mean by your question. But if you're chasing 100% certainty about something, that's like chasing 100% certainty your clean. It's just the classic OCD compulsion pattern. Same with having a value of honesty. How will you every know you've truly been honest?! Chasing goals like those are 110% guaranteed to create more uncertainty.
Time traveling janitor! LMAO
Hi Mark, I hope I get a reply on this one. I have gotten a lot better dealing with my anxiety and thoughts now because of you. But there is still one thing that bothers me to date. It has to do with the habit of master bation. I am writing it like this so Google doesn’t delete my comment. I’ll use the word m2 to describe it further. So I started doing m2 in the later stages of my life. After doing it I suffered through a lot of diseases back to back and for some reason my insecurities also increased. I decided to quit it but for trying for say 5-6 years I wasn’t able to. During my recovering from anxiety and watching your videos I started caring less about the thoughts that made me so obsessive about it. Although anxiety through it is gone the habit is still there. I didn’t care about it for I believed it’s natural and even consulted a psychologist who also arrived with me at same conclusion that it should not bother me. But the problem is it’s addictive nature. When I am not bothered by it, I do it almost daily or even sometimes twice or thrice a day. I wouldn’t be bothered by even this but it’s addictive and the thoughts come only when I feel down for not being able to study or do well or when bored which makes it more addicting. Also because I’ve been trying to quit, quitting feels like the most relevant solution since not quitting kinda takes me back to the cycle of doing it daily or twice thrice daily when I don’t care about it making me demotivated and tired because of doing it, like a downward spiral. I am religious as well and I went to one of the goddesses(I mean temple) and promised her I will not do it because of the reasons mentioned above and also because I feel the thoughts that overtake me that makes me want to do it are wrong regarding other women/woman. But I was not able to quit again making me feel guilty about the promise made to the goddess I believe in. I have absolutely no idea what’s right or wrong here since when I believe it’s okay to m2 then I get all demoralized and demotivated due to loss of energies. If I believe it’s wrong then the thoughts after 4-5 days take over my mind so immensely that I end up doing it again, I guess proving there is some level of addiction. Can you please share your thoughts on the same even if you don’t have a solution or a direct one?
It sounds like you're thinking a lot about this! You're even thinking about whether I'm going to reply or not. I don't understand what question you're asking from writing out those details. But that might be helping point in a useful direction. Do you see all of the stuff you wrote there as important? What if getting wrapped up in all of this reasoning and thinking IS the problem?