When Someone with a Mental Illness Reaches Out to You / Do’s and Don’ts

I thought of this idea this morning. It is a way for people with mental illness to get real help from others. There are some people in your life that want to help but they just end up making things worse.

When that happens, you do not want to communicate with them about your pain.
You end up keeping all of your pain bottled up like a secret.

No one wants to reach out for help just to feel invalidated, misunderstood, judged, scolded, intruded upon, and pushed farther down.

The problem that I have experienced is that people “guess” at what will be helpful. They always guess WRONG because they do not understand.

They have not been inside of that pool of pain, feeling the water going farther and farther over their heads. They do not know what it feels like when we are basically being drowned by our own emotions.

It is not something we are allowing to happen or are causing. It is something that invades our minds like a virus. We have no control over the attack of our own brain on us.

Our brain begins to attack itself, our bodies and our hearts. Asking someone to just stop their mental suffering is like asking someone to stop a broken leg from hurting.

A broken bone hurts because our body senses injury. Then the nervous system tells the brain we are hurt, The brain then responds by sending horrific pain signals back through the nervous system to the injury.
So the cycle is : injury, nervous system, brain, nervous system, severe pain.

It is exactly the same cycle with mental illness. The brain and the nervous system coordinate together.

1.Something triggers an intrusive thought.

2. An intrusive thought hurts the brain by activating neurons that are wired to the person’s thought behaviors.

3.The brain reacts by sending a signal through the nervous system into the entire body.

4. The pain is felt throughout the body. It is a nervous system attack.

Neurological behavioral patterns in a person with mental illness are different than other people. It is a biological difference of how the neurons are attached.

The way our neurons are attached in the brain has a disfunction. We cannot do anything about it. It actually gets worse every time we have an episode.

*I will mention here that there is new holistic neurological research ongoing about the ability to rewire the neurons in our brains. I am studying this currently and will let you know when I have anything helpful to tell you. So there is hope. However for the time being , we are stuck with the faulty wiring.*

If people can understand that there is actual biology that is misbehaving with us, maybe they will understand better that our own brains actually attack us, against our will.

So, I am going to give individual scenarios with a do’s and don’t lists for people with mental illness to use as a tool, when reaching out for help. Please feel free to show them or quote the information I provided above , as a way for a greater understanding that most people do not have.

I have experienced myself, that people trying to “help” you, have some go-to words and actions that are both useless and hurtful to us. My next post is going to be Scenario 1.

Please leave me ideas for situations you have been in, so that I can include them. I will try to post a couple of them a week.

Namaste,
Annie