Mental health awareness week is a good time to reflect on how far you’ve come in your life. Healing wounds from childhood trauma calms anxiety.
If you held shame inside as a child, you grew up with a distorted view of life. Then you most likely had emotions you repressed inside you such as anxious feelings, sadness, and frustration. As a child, you learned and used anxiety to cope.
When you became an adult, you expressed anxiety in unlikely moments when your brain confused current situations with the past. That’s what post-traumatic childhood wounds can do, and can stay with you. It’s the elephant in the room. And no one teaches you along the way how to heal on your own.
I know this because that’s my story in a nutshell.
My parents raised us the best they could. They immigrated to America as adults with their dreams and aspirations, and hope to give their future daughters a better opportunity. That didn’t come without a cost.
They soon learned that they would face struggles, unmet dreams, and unfulfilled desires in a foreign land. They wanted their two children to have what they didn’t have, to achieve and be happy, as most parents do. From a young age, I was taught to be motivated and act perfect (that I was far from).
That’s a double edge sword and if you grew up in the affluent Washington DC area as I did. It can be a recipe for disaster if you’re not perfect at school and you happen to attend one of the top-ranking public schools in the nation. Most second-generation-born children (born in America) know what it’s like to grow up with the expectations of immigrant parents who are part of two distinctly different cultures.
At home, my parents came to me with two separate minds, one stuck in the past 8,000 miles distance away, and the other one they were living their daily life in.
They tried to be helpful as best they could, but their ways ended up sending mixed messages. You can’t teach what you don’t know. I remember feeling frustrated throughout my childhood.
I also remember I held fears of the dark, death, nightmares, and lightning.
I had desire to grow up faster out of my fears and environment. Impacted by my parents’ daily actions, I knew that the only way to free myself was to grow up independent. My mom has retold the story to others, proudly saying when I was 3 or 4 years old, I declared, “I can take care of myself.” Independence was valued back then from my parent’s generation. If you could take care of yourself, then you could take care of the ones around you.
They also didn’t agree with each other in most areas, so there were many daily arguments. They came from a culture that doesn’t believe in divorce so that was not an option. They muddled through and we all co-existed.
At times, they reacted harshly and made wrong decisions without awareness of their bad choices. And they lacked resources. “They did the best they knew how,” I reasoned as a teenager.
We lived in the dark…
There wasn’t the collective consciousness of collaboration efforts and how we can do more together than apart. In our society, embracing the idea of synergy (1+1=3) became largely noticeable to me in the last 5 years. There’s a greater awareness of the abundance mentality that has permeated the culture, that we desperately need to help the world.
Up until the 21st century, we didn’t talk openly about vulnerable personal stories that happened to us. The opposite these days is that we can talk and video just about anything.
I can’t imagine what that life would look like in my parents’ or grandparents’ generations. Maybe scandalous. Freedom of speech may have meant you could be slapped on the wrist or locked up.
When I was growing up, many personal topics were still taboo and sharing would show weakness. It could also invite social services to your home or other unwanted results causing additional stigma. You wanted to appear strong whether that was reality or not. We didn’t have phone cameras or social media so there were no megaphones to spread the word casually. Newspapers, other print mediums, or word of mouth spread any gossip news.
Or in communities, you called up people on the corded phone or visited them in person. There was no internet, period.
We’ve come a long way… people have gotten more courageous and have come out of the woodwork.
Despite the changing times, this unique year and the past 5 years have been so different than previous years. We have become a healthier, more aware society that has our work cut out for us. Knowing our society’s past helps us to make progress…
Let me paint a picture of what mental health awareness (or lack of) was like growing up in the 70’s and 80’s in a culture rich area:
Mental Health Awareness
Mental health was not an openly discussed topic. If someone in society was seen as “crazy” or acted out as an outcast, they were sent to a hospital, psych ward, or mental asylum institution.
If you had anxiety, you would never discuss those emotions and be given a solution or taught how to transform to rid of anxiety. People didn’t know how to help you except to send you to a doctor or therapist, the only types of professional that were commonly known.
Schizophrenia was the only widely known psychological mental disorder if you confronted my college psychology book. People didn’t commonly talk about anxiety attacks, bipolar, or ADD that 20% or more are diagnosed with these days.
Growing up, we didn’t have widely used names for feeling seasonally depressed. I remember uncontrollable sulking and feeling sad every February, and then the feelings would miraculously go away as spring rolled around in March. …I thought it was because I didn’t have someone to celebrate Valentine’s Day with, not seasonal affective disorder (SAD) that strikes in low sunshine months like February. With this now common knowledge, taking Vitamin D supplements could have changed our lives back then.
With the growth of gyms and the evolution in types of home gym equipment, we are aware of the benefits and need for prioritizing exercise in our lives. In 2008 when I started doing yoga, it was a new form of exercise that most had never tried in America. Now, look around and see all the yoga studios and mass appeal. Meditation also has become widely popular for improving mental health and is even performed in schools.
Growing up, we had only two common emotions, sad or happy. Today, worried, stressed, frustrated, and anxious are part of the 25 emoji emotion charts that teachers use to improve mental health awareness.
Healthy Foods and Nutrition
When I was a child, we had 4 basic food groups (fruits and veggies, breads and cereal, milk, and meat). Dietary restrictions were not part of everyday conversation. Those days you would never be asked by your server in a restaurant, “do you have any food allergies?” You either liked your food or you didn’t (and were labeled a “picky eater”).
As the 23 servings per day food pyramid developed as the model we use in our society, then we started to look at what those servings consisted of. We became healthier, looking for less processed foods, doing our own cooking, and looking for fresh, organic foods.
We have better, healthier food choices now. The choice is yours. The non-profit soup kitchens that provide for underprivileged families serve better choices with healthier ingredients.
Sharing Self
In my growing-up years, you wanted to be well-rounded and were awarded in school for those efforts.
Through the internet and easy knowledge transfer, we now live in an era seeking distinct specialists and educators. You can get self-taught education for free if you do a little research online.
Comparatively, people can show up as themselves. You see it everywhere in workplaces and choices of clothing and expressions of appearance. We’ve seen the much-needed growing trend that diversity is accepted.
Vulnerability is embraced. We live in an age of mental health awareness.
I started out sharing my story of where my anxiety roots came from. I had post-traumatic stress from my childhood that I dealt with in my late 20’s. At the time I also had post-work trauma and had been victimized.
That made me reflect. I felt like I was missing something. There had to be more to life. I self-discovered I had been wasting most of my 20’s replaying negative thoughts that I didn’t know how to stop. I had been following Tony Robbins since a young adult, but I still didn’t know how to shrink and change the worried and negative thoughts in my mind. Gradually, I renewed my mind with kinder, more compassionate thoughts for myself and productivity. That came after a desire to grow, and transform in knowing who I was and was becoming, as my identity in the Universe and in this world.
I met the right people along my path, who had a heart for a deeper connection with their Creator and mine. I didn’t grow up in any religion and had never attended church until later in life. That’s when my life shifted. When I started listening to my heart and believing there was more.
Then in my journey into my thirties and forties, I became someone healed and whole from the inside out. I realized my past pains and trials helped me grow and become resilient. I’m happy to be fearless and look forward to the future. I’m not afraid of anything from the past.
I let go of any past resentment or grudges I had held, for my personal growth. The reason I believe we are all here. To grow and positively impact others’ lives.
You can only live fully without restraints if you forgive everyone who has hurt you. Not because they deserve it, but because you deserve a better life. Switch to loving thoughts. You can control your life in your mind and actions, despite your situations, what you have, or what you don’t have or did, know, or didn’t get.
That’s emotional freedom and happiness.
If you don’t know how to do that now, aspire to learn, and you will. Speed up your own progress. With the power inside you, anything is possible, and you CAN in your abundant beliefs. You can transform all your previous fears and hurts.
If I can do it, you can do it too.
Why waste another moment of your precious life in misery or your own mind’s prison? Be at peace, find joy and your purpose.
If you carry fears, worry, or experience anxiety, there’s a better way to restore your balance.
Choose to discover how to improve your mental health awareness.