Face It

When I am working with clients in therapy, I often share with them this piece of universal wisdom:

The extent to which you are willing to cope with reality is the extent to which you can be mentally healthy.

It’s just a phenomenon I have observed over the past 25 years of working with people as a psychologist and as a human being over the past 50 years of living my own life.

Face It or Be Stuck

If you want to rid yourself of feelings of anxiety or depression but are not willing to face and find a way to deal with whatever the realities of your life are, you can forget it.

You are going to be stuck with anxiety and depression. Get comfortable with that. Being willing to face whatever has happened in your life or is currently happening in your life is often a daunting task. And you may need help finding ways to cope with it, deal with it, heal from it, and move on.

But in my experience, you don’t even have to be making very good headway with dealing with reality to have better mental health. You just have to be willing to face reality instead of using denial or escapism in all of their unhealthy forms.

Reality Is A Brick Wall

Reality really is that brick wall that you can choose to bash yourself into over and over again because you just can’t believe it’s there or you just don’t want to believe that it’s there. But, it’s there.

The moment that you can admit to yourself that it is there and begin to make some decisions about what you want to do about that wall, you’re set free from all the self-destructive coping skills you had to practice in order to deny or curse its existence.

Face it.
Face the wall.
Touch it.
Explore the bricks.
Explore the mortar.
Read the graffiti.
Paint some graffiti.

Just don’t keep walking into it over and over again, telling me and yourself and everyone else that it isn’t there. That it shouldn’t be there, so it isn’t really there. That you’ve really got this, as you plow into it one more time, coming away bloody and bruised. Again.