“Be the reason someone smiles. Be the reason
someone feels loved and believes in the goodness in people.”
Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
For the first time since they
began hosting Mental Health Awareness Week (MHAW) twenty years ago, the Mental
Health Foundation made the decision to change this year’s topic in response to
the Coronavirus Pandemic and subsequent lockdown. Originally, the theme was set
to be ‘sleep’ but it has now been changed to ‘kindness’ with the Foundation’s
Chief Executive saying that “now more than ever, we need to re-discover
kindness in our daily lives.”
Originally, for the ‘sleep’
topic, I’d planned to feature a questionnaire with a number of different people
every day for the entire week and although the change in theme meant having to
scrap my brainstorming and ideas, I was pleased with the decision to focus on
‘kindness.’ I mean, in all honesty, I think it would have been a bit ridiculous
if the Foundation hadn’t responded to the Pandemic which is having a horrific
impact on a lot of people’s mental health. There’s always the possibility of
three different attitudes with negative things; you can either block them out
and pretend they aren’t happening, or you can accept them as real and put all
your attention and focus on them, or – finally – you could find the balance and
recognize the negative whilst also refusing to forget about the positives in
life. I think that in their decision to change the theme, the Foundation got
the balance right and acknowledged the impact the Virus is having whilst also putting
focus on something positive.
With kindness being defined as
‘the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate;’ I think it’s easy
to establish that it’s definitely a quality that has come to light in the wake
of the Coronavirus and the lockdown. Initially, I think there was a lot of fear
and panic and it brought out some disastrous qualities in people in causing
them to bulk buy and stockpile a number of essential items in supermarkets and
shops. It seems as though, in time, people have learnt – or at least realized –
that everyone is ‘in this together.’ We may not all be going through the exact
same thing but we definitely have a lot more in common than we did before
lockdown, because a lot of people are struggling in a similar way and with the
same aspects of the lockdown guidelines. Discovering our similarities has
brought out empathy in a lot of people and I think that’s been a huge
motivation in the kind acts that everyone has been doing; which vary from
companies providing discount and freebies to NHS staff, to people offering to
do a vulnerable person’s food shopping for them.
Being classed as a vulnerable
person has made it a little bit hard to do anything kind for someone else but I
was desperate to help in some way so I signed up to be an NHS
Volunteer Responder for the new Check-In and Chat service. It
means that a person can be referred or can self-refer to the service and the
Volunteers in the area receive an alert that someone needs help and support and
you’re given the person’s number to make contact with them and provide a
listening ear for their struggles. The Responder programme offers other
services too; for more information and to get help just ring: 0808 196 3646
My second good deed has been
sending little gifts to my friends, my God Children, and my colleagues at Cats Protection Tyneside
Adoption Centre. I love that I’m not the only one doing this
because on more than one occasion, I’ve been labelled materialistic and I used
to hate it! Now though, I’ve learnt there’s nothing wrong with storing some
importance in material things, so long as you don’t hold them above anything
else like your loved ones. I think that gift-giving is important because it tells
people that it’s acceptable for your mental – and in some cases physical –
health to benefit from material things and encourages them to build on this.
And you don’t have to spend a lot of money on something; it’s the thought and
the gesture and the effort that matters. Showing that you’re thinking about the
person and that you care about their happiness will mean more than how much
you’re spent on them!
Now, does anyone remember
that episode of Friends
where they talk about selfless good deeds? One of the characters is certain
that there’s no such thing as a selfless act because all good deeds make you
feel good about yourself, so how can they be selfless? I think it’s ok to feel
good about doing something nice for someone else so long as you aren’t doing it
because you expect something in return!
The other form of kindness is
towards yourself – something which is much more practical given the current
lockdown protocol! Personally, I’ve always struggled to show kindness to myself
and I think it stems from the abuse I experienced when I was 15. With my abuser
continuously refusing to accept responsibility for what he was doing, and me desperate
for an explanation and a reason why it was happening, I began blaming myself –
something which, unfortunately, is often the case for abuse survivors. I think
that the self-blame I experienced was also in response to the fact that without
my abuser taking any responsibility, it meant that retribution wasn’t possible.
I didn’t know who to take my anger out on – and I had a hell of a lot of anger
– and it was so straightforward to put it on myself; to hurt myself and to
punish myself.
It took a lot of hours in
therapy to persuade me that I hadn’t deserved the rape and abuse and that even
though my abuser refuses to admit to his guilt, he is still responsible and deserves
the consequences for it. Initially, I knew this was the ‘right’ attitude to
have – I knew it was the truth, but it was still hard to accept because part of
me couldn’t stand knowing who deserved the punishment and yet realizing that he
probably will never experience it. There was almost a bit of me that thought
‘I’d rather hurt myself than deal with knowing that he won’t pay the price for
everything he did.’ Lots of people have reassured me that karma exists and that
justice will be served and whilst I really, really hope that’s the case; I
think that the best thing to do is learn to accept that it might not happen. That
he might plead his innocence right up until he’s in a grave! ‘Prepare for the
worst, hope for the best’ and all that!
Once I’d learnt that the
abuse hadn’t been my fault, I found it a whole lot easier to show kindness to
myself, and when I was taught the Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) skill of
self-soothe, I learnt to put it into practice fairly quickly. I find showing
myself some kindness when I’m struggling with my mental health really
beneficial because it reminds me that I deserve some happiness and safety, and sometimes
the actual action of self-soothing can also be a distraction from suicidal
thoughts or thoughts to self-harm. It can provide me with the time to concentrate
on something other than those thoughts so that by the time I’ve finished the
act of kindness, those thoughts and feelings have either gone or are at least a
lot more manageable.
I’ve also learnt how
essential it is to show myself kindness when I have self-harmed because it is otherwise
so easy to be overly critical of myself. I have this app on my phone which
records how many days it has been since I last self-harmed and sometimes it’s
really motivational because – being a perfectionist – I don’t want that number
to go back to 0. It can also be debilitating because I can end up feeling like
a bit of a failure, as though I’ve ruined all my hard work and that it was all
for nothing. After attending A&E for a self-harm cut, a Doctor once told me
not to be too harsh on myself and that whilst yes, I was responsible for what I’d
done, it wasn’t the end of the world. Sometimes though, I think that maybe it’s
a good thing that I criticise myself after doing something like that because it
can be a deterrent from self-harming to think that if I did, it’s going to
leave me feeling so pathetic and worthless.
My instinct for MHAW was to
do one kind act every day for the week and blog about them but with the lockdown
protocol barely budging, that seems to be impractical. So, I figured that every
day for the rest of the week, there’ll be a post on an act of self-kindness to
hopefully motivate people into being more kind to themselves and to provide inspiration
for what they could do to do this… here’s what the week looks like:
Day
Two: Reading – my favourite books on kindness
Day Three:
Spending time with others
Day Four:
Movies – my top movies about kindness
Day
Five: Acts of Self-Care
Day
Six: Building on passions and hobbies
Day
Seven: A Round-Up of the entire week - every day I’ll also be vlogging the
things that I’m doing for myself and on Sunday (May 24th) I’ll be posting
all the videos right here on I’m NOT Disordered!