Whole Health Series 1 of 3: Mental Health (Stanley Stevenson, 09/28/23)

So tonight we're going to talk about mental health, and it's a huge topic, as you can

imagine.

We could spend weeks just doing a seminar every week on some aspect of mental health.

And I think that even though we're on the way to the kingdom, we are marching along

and our sanctification is in process as we go, I think all of us could use a little bit

of mental health treatment now and then, just because life is hard.

We live in a fallen world and life is hard.

Relationships are hard.

And so it's important for us to understand what we can do and how we can live better

lives, more fulfilled relationships.

And so I was really glad to see that this is your text that you are, is the cornerstone,

the hinge for this series.

And my area of interest is your mind.

What do you do with your mind?

Do you know your mind?

And how does that impact you on a daily basis?

So tonight, instead of doing a presentation on depression or anxiety, which I understand

you've already had at some point, I wanted to get a little more specific and focus on

your mind, maybe in a little bit of a different way than you might expect.

But first, I think we need to define terms.

What is mental health?

Does anybody want to venture a guess?

I tend to wonder, because I used to teach.

I don't tap people and say you, but I do tend to wonder.

And if I look at you, I don't really mean for you to answer.

But what is mental health?

When you hear the term, and we hear it a lot nowadays, what is mental health?

So two important words, mental, your mind, and health.

But when we say somebody has a mental health issue, we usually mean that there's something

wrong with them.

So let's see if we can understand what mental health is.

Mental health covers the idea of emotional, psychological, and social well-being.

So your emotions, your thoughts, and your interaction with people, how we think, how

we feel, how we act, helps us.

It helps us to determine how to handle stress and how to handle relationships and then how

to make choices.

So when somebody has a mental health issue, very often they are somehow they have some

negative consequences around these ideas of how to handle stress.

They're anxious.

How to relate to people.

They feel inferior or they feel superior or they feel angry.

How to make good choices.

People that have mental health issues in how their mind works, they don't make very good

choices.

People spend money.

People do dangerous things.

People withdraw.

So it impacts how we function.

It's important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.

Those of you who have worked in or work in places where there are children, whether it's

school or some other place, know that kids have a tremendous amount of pressure on them

these days.

Social media puts an amazing amount of pressure on kids who are unable to distinguish between

reality and fantasy or somebody else's reality and their reality.

Pressure of being liked and not liked.

Somebody unliked me and it's a crisis.

And so kids have a tremendous amount of pressure.

And adolescents, those of you who work with high school kids, you know the kinds of incredible

pressures that they are under to conform.

And it used to be before social media that it was just people in your peer group.

Now it's the world.

Now you have to compete with the world.

And so that adds a tremendous amount of stress.

Over the course of your life, you experience mental health problems, your thinking, your

mood, your behavior could be affected.

Nobody in this room is immune.

Over the course of your life, all of us have been impacted by our mental health being compromised,

just like your physical health is sometimes compromised.

COVID was a huge impact, annual flu, whatever it might be, maybe you went to the doctor

and you got a bad diagnosis.

It's the same thing with mental health.

There used to be, it's not so much anymore, but there used to be this idea that if you're

a Christian, you don't have mental health problems.

Or if you're a Christian, you don't have problems.

Well the reality is when you are a Christian, as a Christian is an invitation for the evil

one to bring more calamity, to pressure you more in the areas of your mental health, how

your mind works and so forth and so on.

So there are contributing factors to mental health.

Your biology, your genes, your brain chemistry, sometimes brain chemistry is not quite right.

Life experiences, childhood trauma, so many of us, so many people that we know, their

parents parented the way they were parented.

And that hasn't changed very much in the last 100 years except maybe in the last 30 or 40

years when we got a lot of research about how to be better parents.

But people would parent the way they were parented.

My father and my mother were products of the 30s, very difficult times.

And they parented the way they were parented.

Their parents had no skills on parenting.

Kids were to be seen and not heard.

And maybe some of you can relate to that.

And so abuse can be born out of that kind of an environment.

Family history of mental health problems.

If you know somebody who has a serious mental health problem, chances are there's somebody

in their family tree that has problems as well.

So the point of this is to say mental health and mental health issues affects us all.

We are not immune to that.

It's just to the degree.

So I was, I spoke to Sarah and said, what is it that you really want me to focus on?

And she gave some suggestions about maybe some skills of how to deal with relationships,

how to deal with mental health struggles.

And I thought one thing that we might do is because I want to focus on how the mind works,

is I want to give you a list of 10 what we call cognitive distortions that we all use.

And a cognitive distortion, here's the thing.

I'm ahead of myself.

I'll be right back.

So this list is a list of signs and symptoms that you or if you're in a friendship with

somebody who is exhibiting these signs can be indicators of some kind of mental health

distress, mental health malfunction.

So just scan through this list and make a mental note, if you will, of the kinds of

things that you might see or experience that could be early warning signs, early warning

signs of some kind of mental health issue.

Remember, it can be mood, it can be emotion, it can be psychological.

Mind size does not fit all in mental health.

Any questions or observations about this list?

When we see clients, when I see clients, very often clients come in because they have a

problem that they want to solve or they have a question.

And that question usually has something to do with I need help in whatever it is, figuring

something out.

The question that is asked is very rarely the issue that the person has.

So it's like opening a can of worms.

People generally don't come and say, you know, I've got a pride problem.

I really need some help with, I'm just really proud and I know it's a spiritual issue and

it's a mental health issue.

No.

They usually come with some other issue about relationships or so forth.

So maybe this will be helpful for you just make a little bit of a mental note about it.

So your mind is a liar.

What?

My mind is a liar?

Yes.

Your mind lies to you.

Your mind tells you to think and feel things that are generally not correct.

You experience the world in a particular way.

You relate to people in a particular way.

But if there were four of us relating to the same person, we'd each have a different experience.

It's like the old thing about five people saw a car accident, everybody had a different

story.

Well, it's the same thing with our minds.

And I'm going to show you tonight that your mind lies to you and you don't even know it.

I don't know it.

Because what we do is we tell ourselves stories about events.

We tell ourselves stories about relationships, and those stories are not always accurate.

So let's go through these 10 what we call cognitive distortions.

In other words, your mind is trying to make sense of the world, and it does it in various

ways.

So the first one is called all or nothing thinking.

And as we go through this list, just make a mental note and see if any of this resonates

with you.

So the thinking is, if I can't do it perfectly, I'll not do it at all.

I ate one cookie, I'm off my diet, I may as well eat the whole batch.

It's all or nothing.

All or nothing.

I'm so far in debt, I'll never get out.

I may as well buy whatever it is.

I may as well buy a new iPhone.

That's thinking.

And I want to make a distinction between thinking and feeling for us tonight, because this is

very often at the heart of mental illness, is we feel something because of our cognitive

distortion.

We feel a certain way because our thinking is not accurate or our thinking is crooked.

So when you think these things, you could feel helpless, depressed, or justified in

giving up.

So let me just talk about thinking and feeling just a little more.

And if you have questions about that, please just interrupt me.

We're all family here.

When you ask somebody, how are you doing today?

They might say something like, I think I'm doing okay.

You asked for a feeling and they gave you a thought.

So we sometimes confuse the two.

What you think is different than what you feel.

And what we believe is an event, an event that leads us to feel something is because

of the event.

I lost my wallet.

I feel desperate.

I feel afraid.

I feel frantic.

Well, it wasn't the fact that I lost, it wasn't the wallet's fault.

But it's what I told myself about losing the wallet.

I have to pay for my parking and not be able to get my car out.

They're going to steal my credit.

And so we get frantic.

But the real issue about having lost your wallet didn't create that feeling.

Somebody might say, who lost their wallet?

I'll just call a credit card company and it'll be fine.

Somebody else is panicked.

Why?

It's the same event.

It's what you tell yourself about that event that leads you to feel the feelings that you

feel.

An event doesn't create the feeling.

Right.

Right.

So we need to ask ourselves, where did these thoughts come from?

Because every feeling that you feel is based on a thought.

And when I first heard that, I was probably in graduate school, I said, nah, that's not

true.

My feelings are real because somebody did something to me and I feel what you feel because

what you think about that event.

And so there are some people who have what's called all or nothing thinking.

It's like, it's either this or it's that.

But life is lived in the gray.

Life is all about living in the gray.

Overgeneralizing.

So the thinking is, I'm never going to get a good job.

I'm always messing up.

This marriage will never get any better than it is now.

God will never love me because of...

You ever find yourself overgeneralizing?

It's like making these big sweeping statements.

Generalizing, it's all going to be bad.

Or on the other side, it's all fantastic all the time.

Well overgeneralizing, that kind of thinking can leave you feeling sad or depressed or

hopeless, things are never going to change, anxious, maybe even frustrated and angry.

So can you see that this thinking pattern here contributes to that feeling?

When we overgeneralize, we see things in a certain way and that can lead to mental health

issues.

Which way am I going?

Black and white thinking.

I've had many, many clients who come in and they tend to overgeneralize but they also

have black and white thinking.

Where there is no gray area.

And they come in feeling angry and mistreated and victimized or very discouraged.

I'm a complete failure.

My spouse is such an idiot.

This belongs to another one as well that we will come to.

I'm the only one who gets things done around here.

If you've ever been in a marriage or if you lived in the dorm with somebody who didn't

pull their weight or a co-worker and you were the one who was always doing the stuff, so

you thought.

Black and white thinking.

I love my mother-in-law.

She's a wonderful person and she lives with us and she's lived with us now for five years

and she's just turned 89.

But she's a mind reader.

It's an incredible skill.

It's not accurate but it's an incredible skill.

We'll be eating breakfast sometime and there'll be one little link left and I've had my two

and so my wife passes it to her and she said, oh, Stanley wants this.

And she's doing it out of generosity and she's doing it out of love.

She's reading my mind.

She will often say, well, you want to do this, don't you?

And if you're ever married to somebody who reads your mind, it can be frustrating.

I used to think it was a skill.

When I was in graduate school, I just longed to sit with somebody and stroke my...

I didn't have a beard but I wanted to stroke my beard and be very thoughtful and say, yes,

you're thinking this and you're feeling that and all the rest of it.

And I learned very, very quickly from my professors that I was engaging in an activity that was

not appropriate because we don't know what you're thinking.

We don't know what you want.

But we make assumptions about each other and that interferes with a genuine relationship.

It can lead to the feeling of being sometimes angry or vindictive or upset or even insecure,

anxious and fearful, assuming that people don't like me.

Oh, I know she doesn't like me.

See how she looked at me?

She doesn't like me.

Somebody disliked me on Facebook.

I feel insecure about that or I'm going to get him or I'm going to get her because I

know what's going on in their mind.

My kids must think I'm such a jerk.

Well, you don't know that.

I know exactly how you feel.

Have you ever had somebody say that to you?

Oh, I know exactly how you feel.

That happened to me one time and all of a sudden it's about them.

All of a sudden you were sharing something about your life and now they're telling you

their life story.

So that can lead to the sense of being upset or even angry.

I was telling you my story and you hijacked my story and started telling me how you feel

exactly the same way.

So the thinking, the mind reading can lead to some negative feelings.

Yes?

It could be, yes.

So the mind reading is what we'll call the wounded well.

That's us.

Right?

So it's on a continuum.

So if you go this way far enough, then it can become paranoia.

Absolutely.

Then everybody doesn't like me.

I know what people, I know what you're thinking about.

It becomes very intrusive.

So yes, exactly right.

But for the wounded well, some of us tend to just assume we know what people think,

assume we know what people want.

And that can be frustrating.

Catastrophizing.

So this is a cognitive dissonance where everything is bad or everything's fantastic.

Catastrophizing.

This relationship is never going to work out.

I'm going to fail for sure.

You just know it's the worst case scenario always.

Have you ever met somebody like that?

We call them negative.

Well, they're negative because the way they see the world is everything's a catastrophe.

Everything bad's going to, I'm going to make a complete fool of myself when I sing special

music.

I just know it.

I just know what's going to happen.

Wow.

That's quite a skill.

You know what's going to happen.

Right?

She's late.

She's in the car and she's in a ditch somewhere and she's going to die.

Had a client not too long ago say something very similar to that and she really had this

thinking process that led her to see everything as a crisis, not only just a crisis but a

dangerous crisis.

And I'm going to be stuck in this job forever.

So that can lead to the feeling of being anxious or fearful about the future or can prevent

real helpful action.

When you think in sort of this, in these catastrophic terms, it can immobilize you.

And I don't know if you know anybody like that.

It's like they're frozen because everything is so bad that they don't even want to try

anything.

Right?

Any questions so far?

I know I'm going really fast through this.

Any questions so far?

Okay.

Emotional reasoning.

If somebody feels, so I flipped these because for this one, sometimes the feeling needs

to be thinking.

So emotional reasoning, you feel anxious in social situations, therefore I must be an

awkward person.

Well, being an awkward person is different than having some anxiety about being with

people.

Being an awkward person is something completely different.

But their reasoning goes from this emotional state to this thinking that says because I'm

feeling this emotion, then I must have this deficit.

Feeling hopeless about improving your marriage, there's nothing that can be done.

Again, this is that sense of not being able to think rationally and everything is this

sense of hopelessness, this emotional state.

Labeling.

I come from a family, and I won't tell you which side of the family, but I come from

a family in which labeling is sport.

Everyone's an idiot.

Everyone's stupid.

Everyone's a fool.

And that guy cut me off.

What a jerk.

Now, there probably isn't anybody in the room who hasn't labeled at one time or the other,

but there are people for whom this way of thinking is chronic.

They cannot engage with anybody without putting some kind of a label on them.

Sometimes it's done.

The ulterior motive is to make me feel good about myself.

If I can label you, then I feel better about myself.

But it can also have the sense of being trapped.

So I have to label somebody because I feel trapped.

I made a mistake at work today.

I'm a loser.

My son made a bad choice.

He's a bad kid.

Parents can sometimes fall into that trap, particularly with other people's children,

because your kids are always good, but everyone else's kids are, oh, they're just brats.

I messed up in this relationship.

I must be broken.

So you messed up in one relationship.

I messed up.

When there's a possibility that you could learn something from having a broken relationship,

you could learn something about yourself.

Maybe there's some things that would be important for you to change.

But if you label it, it's easier to discount.

So if I label you, it's easy for me to then be really cruel to you because you're no longer

you.

You're a label.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There was somebody in leadership in this country a few years ago that was one of his favorite

tactics was to call people names.

It's also at a very low developmental age.

It's what happens on playgrounds.

It's what happens between three and four-year-olds.

It's an immature way of seeing the world.

But if I can label you, then I can feel really pretty good about myself.

That's the strategy.

So this is a cognitive dissonance that I see everyone in the world as being some kind of

a label.

But I can feel trapped and hopeless about it because mental filtering.

Have you ever gotten a compliment from somebody and immediately dismissed it?

You get a compliment and you say something like, well, if they only knew.

Or somebody compliments your weight or a dress or a shirt or something like that.

But your weight in particular, it's like, I'm not even close to my goal weight.

Rather than saying thank you.

We tend to filter out the good stuff and people who think this way

have a sense of brokenness about them.

There's something about them that they just can't take it all in.

Have you ever really, you've had a failure and you just keep going over it and over it

and over it.

You can't let it go.

You had that one situation and now that's the only focus that you have.

You can't, there's no room for any of the good part of you because you're filtering

it out.

Personalization.

Everything others do is about you so you think if something bad happens it's your fault.

Depending on the family that you were raised in, this can really be something that you

learn at an early age.

And we could talk about birth order and some of those things.

But if you're in a family where you got punished for somebody else's stuff at an early age,

it would be easy then to begin to see the world that way.

That you blame yourself or for example, my son misbehaved, I must be a bad mother.

It's taking on the hurt and the anger and the brokenness because you think it's all

about you.

So sometimes people have this way of seeing the world that they kind of are responsible

for people's feelings.

They're responsible for what's going on.

Somebody doesn't like them on Facebook and they take it on personally.

Cashier didn't smile at me and so that comes across as being they just disrespected me.

And really the reality is it could be something entirely different.

It's not always about you.

I remember when our daughters were young, we have twins, and I was the stepfather and

I came in and they were at that stage where they were pretty narcissistic as young children

tend to be.

And I wasn't a very sophisticated father at that point and I would say, it's not always

about you because they would take on.

They would always think it was them, it was their fault or they needed praise all the

time.

It's not always about you.

That wasn't a particularly great stellar moment in parenting for myself, but that's the sense

is that people, there are some people who feel like the sun rises and sets on them.

It's all about them.

Unreal ideal.

Have you ever had this feeling that everybody else is doing better than me?

Yes, sir.

So, you would ask them about that reality.

I would ask them about that reality.

I would say something like, ask questions about, because they were, by the time I came

into their life, they were six, five or six, so they had enough cognitive structure that

they could communicate with me.

I would want to know why they felt that way.

What was it that led them to feel like they would be responsible for that or that it was

about them?

A great line, a great parenting line, a great therapist line is, tell me more about how

you feel about that so I can understand.

Just becoming curious because there are some people who just have a hard time exiting the

stage and letting somebody else be the focus of attention.

So I'd probably do something like that.

I'm not sure that that's even exactly right, but that's what comes to mind now.

How about you?

What do you think you might do?

Do you have any thoughts about that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, all of these things are, we all reflect some of these things from time to

time.

This is all part of the human condition.

This, okay, this is confession.

I'm the youngest of six boys.

Six boys.

And I'm the youngest by a long way.

My mom was done having kids and then, now I'm the best of them and she let me know that,

right?

So the way that was countered by the rest of the family was, he's a show off, stuff

showing off.

I was just living in the glow of my mother's love that was so lavish that I did think it

was all about me.

I got married and my wife helped me understand that it's not always about me.

In fact, it's seldom about me.

That's an exaggeration, but you get the point is that sometimes we get into relationships

with people and they put us in our place.

Now, we can feel angry about that.

We can feel frustrated.

It's like, well, my mother, she didn't treat me this way.

I mean, I have to, you know, one of the best things and the worst things my wife ever said

to me was when, thank you, we were dating, she said, I don't need you.

What?

You don't need me?

But I'm a rescuer.

I'm the sunshine.

She said, I want you.

But I don't need you.

Wow, that was, my little head just almost exploded because my life had been built around

this idea that it's about me.

And I have the power, quote unquote, the power to make people feel a certain way, you know,

because it's all about me.

So I blessed my wife and at the time I was not very happy.

I once had a couple come in to see me and they were concerned about their son.

He had some, he was feeling depressed and he was feeling that maybe the world would

be better off without him.

And I had the sense that they kind of felt responsible in some kind of a way.

And I had to reassure them that they weren't bad parents.

They were concerned about their son.

But they had the sense that what he was going through was a reflection on them.

Now there are some cultures in which the family is the most important thing.

And if you do something inappropriate, it is a reflection on the parents.

You remember that story about, you know, the Bible where the disciple says, who sinned

that this man was blind?

Well, it wasn't that anybody had sinned.

It wasn't this kind of a thing.

He was blind in order to show the glory of God, but that's a whole another story.

But that idea that somehow it's about me is, when you find out it's not, you can have these

feelings, right?

Thanks for the question, though.

All my friends are married and happy and my life's a mess.

No one's been through what I've been through.

Nobody knows what I've been through.

So how can I, I'm just never good enough.

You might know people who just have this, everybody's doing better than I am and I'm

never going to make it.

The idea that everyone else's world is better than, you know, your own.

Facebook and YouTube have contributed to that because Facebook and YouTube, you see people

on their best day doing their best thing.

You don't know that they made 14 cakes before that one turned out perfectly, right?

But you think, oh, they'll be able to make a cake.

Well, did you see how many they had to throw away?

No.

But that idea that everyone else is doing better than me and so I'm never going to amount

to anything and so there must be something wrong with me.

So you can see how this kind of thinking leads to that feeling, right?

If you think this way, if you see the world this way, then you're going to have some feelings.

But what we do is we tell ourselves that the feelings are accurate.

The feelings must be true.

But the feelings only exist because of how we think.

And I know my time is running out, isn't it?

Right?

7.30.

Okay.

Oh, good.

So now what?

So the idea is to begin to notice what you are thinking.

What is the pattern based on what you've seen tonight?

And I know it's a blur.

It's a blur.

You can go online to somebody's best day and you can find all of this information.

But begin to recognize what you think, particularly when there's a crisis, particularly when somebody

says something to you and you have a feeling.

Take a deep breath and say, what am I thinking about that?

What does that mean that that person looked at me that way?

My automatic thought is there's something wrong with me or I did something wrong.

And challenge your thinking because your thinking, your mind lies to you.

You have what we call automatic thoughts.

And they could be any of these thoughts, patterns that we just saw tonight.

When you notice your thinking pattern, you can learn to change it.

You can change your thinking.

You can take a deep breath.

And I'm going to show you something here in just a second.

Get another perspective from a close friend.

If you see this pattern over and over and over again, you have to be careful.

You have to be able to really trust that this person will give you honest feedback in order

to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but somebody who will challenge you.

But check with somebody.

Check with a therapist who can challenge your thinking.

Look for words that you use.

For example, if you use words like always and never and forever and I know what he thinks

and feels, if those are kind of the words that you are gravitating towards, challenge

them because these forever words, these catastrophic words, these words that are global are generally

not accurate.

Yes?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you know, our bodies are so complex.

We have our antenna out all the time.

As you are sitting there listening to me, your antenna is out and you are sensing how

your body feels and what's going on and what you're thinking and what you're feeling.

It's a great question.

There are some people who get physically sick before they know what it is that they're feeling.

And once they figure out what they're feeling, then they can change their thinking about

it.

You know, people just want to crawl under the covers and, you know, because it's just

everything is so bad.

It's a physiological response.

They're tired and they run down.

It's a physiological response to how they're seeing the world or how they are thinking.

So the thinking and the physiological and the feelings, it all kind of comes together.

But for some people, they are much more sensitive physiologically than others.

There are some people who say they don't feel.

Well, we all feel something.

We can deny our feelings, but it comes out of our body in a kind of a way.

If you have ever been in a relationship breakup, you know how it just feels like somebody is

sitting on your chest sometimes, partly because of what you tell yourself about the breakup.

This breakup is just crushing me, right?

Or this breakup is just taking everything out of me, right?

And then your body says, oh yeah, it really has.

You feel.

So they are intimately, intimately connected.

Because when we work with people who are trauma survivors in particular, we want them to begin

to pay attention to how their body feels.

Because whatever you deny, your body feels.

If you feel it, allow yourself to feel it, change your thinking about it, you spare your

body the agony because all of us, our bodies are like sponges.

But it comes from how you view the world, how you view the event, what you think about.

Challenge your thoughts and don't believe everything you think.

Now that's not to say that, you know, I'm, that sermon or that person, you don't want

to start writing your thoughts off.

But what you think about relationships, what you think about what happens to you, how you

see the world and the story you tell yourself about those events.

Because your mind is telling you a story.

It's telling you a story even now about this experience.

Maybe some of you are discounting what I've said.

It's an automatic thought.

That's okay.

But challenge it.

See if it's true or not.

And if you have a strong feeling, a strong emotional response to something, check out

what you're thinking.

Stop.

Take a breath.

Take a walk.

If you're really emotionally charged up.

And then ask yourself the questions about what you are thinking.

Challenge the story.

So we'll take just a minute on this.

So you ran into Walmart and saw a friend of yours.

She was short with you.

You're barely, you're barely taking time to speak to you and hurried away.

So your automatic thoughts could be, that was rude.

She disrespected me.

Angry.

She never ignores me.

She always has something to say to me.

Worried.

What did I do or say?

Or labeling.

What a jerk.

So let me do this first.

In challenging your thoughts, create a list.

And it can be the craziest list.

It can be anything.

But create a list of alternatives of what it could be.

So your automatic thoughts are, could be some of these.

Here are some sort of made up things as alternatives.

She had a fight with her husband this morning.

She's upset.

Her dog was in the car and she had to hurry back out.

She had something in the oven and had to hurry home.

Her husband was waiting in the car, maybe with the dog.

Or she had a bad headache.

She just got up on the wrong side of the bed.

Hey, it's early onset dementia.

Who knows?

But it might not be about you.

It could be anything.

So these are kind of crazy.

But the idea is to challenge your thinking if your automatic thought is to blame or to

catastrophize or to personalize or any of these to label.

Challenge the thinking.

Challenge your automatic responses because those automatic responses come from your life

experiences, they come from your personality, they come from your brain chemistry, they

come from a lot of places.

But they're not always accurate.

And you can create what we call neuro pathways.

It's like this is the easiest way to think about things.

Rather than looking at the evidence and evaluating it and challenging how you think, it's just

sometimes easier just to label somebody and move on or to blame yourself and move on.

But mental health, and I use health in the term in the sense that of being well, being

healthy, is we want to have the most accurate perception of our relationships that we can

and not just with each other but with ourselves.

So that we're not always one down or we're not always broken or we're not always feeling

depressed or we're not always feeling anxious.

In order to not have those feelings, in order to have the wellness that we need, we need

to think more accurately and to challenge all of these distortions.

And we have distortions because, like I said at the beginning, we're in a broken world,

we're broken people.

And we're doing the best we can to survive, but sometimes our survival skills hurt us

and we don't even know it.

So I know that was a lot of information and I hope some of it resonates.

And if you want more, you can find a way to find it.

Let's have a prayer before we go.

Our Father in Heaven, we are so grateful that you are a God who listens and that you hear

us when we cry, even when our cries are inappropriate, even when we need to praise instead of cry.

We know that you hear.

We know that you have experienced all of these things and been challenged by these things,

but you overcame.

So that's our prayer.

That when God the Father sees us, he will see a loving Jesus who embraces us in spite

of our weaknesses, in spite of the challenges that we have.

And I pray that each day our seeking will be for your Kingdom to come in our lives.

We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.