Timeless: The Frequent Attempt (Chapter. 4)

Written by Andi Bazaar, Co-wrote by Mark J. Levstein, José Schenkkan Joseph and Clayton-Euridicé Schofield | June 23, 2023

"One of the most crucial aspects of maintaining good mental health is not to allow what we are going through, our negative emotions and feelings pp to pile up."

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden. It is easier to say, “my tooth is aching” than to say “my heart is broken”

One of the most crucial aspects of maintaining good mental health is not to allow what we are going through, our negative emotions and feelings pp to pile up.

Opening our hearts to someone or journaling can be a potent mental and emotional detox, always remember that vulnerability is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of honesty and inner strength.

PS: It is important to be vulnerable and open up to people who can help, guide, emotionally support and most importantly maintain confidentiality and also have the integrity to not use what we share for their ulterior motives.

The difference between "physical pain" and "mental pain and the battle to keep it at a higher level" has been going on for a long time and along with it there is a definite answer that mental pain is more painful.

If we go into the depth of this answer, then physical pain is due to the pain caused by internal or external injury to any part of the body. The same mental pain is born from the pain that arises after feeling that injury.

A part of the body remains part of the body, but the pain arising in the brain affects the whole body because the center of our body is our mind which is shaken by a small bad thought and with it the whole body.

Toxic positivity is a real problem that can do harm, it is a form of condescension against people whose mental health is not doing well or to guilt them out of their pain. For example, think positive thoughts. We have 80k thoughts a day, it is not possible to make them positive.

Please don’t hesitate to cry, scream in a pillow, speak to yourself, anything to externalize the pain you may be going through right now. There is no ridiculous way to express it, don’t keep it in as much as possible. When we repress emotions, we postpone the bill to the future!

There is a special place in hell for medical or mental health professionals who step out of line and recommend marriage or religion as a solution. You break a fundamental trust in patients that can make them stay in pain longer and hesitate to get help again.

TW: SUICIDE

Let’s about mental health, specifically how it is portrayed in the media and how that can contribute to its stigma and add to the reluctance for people to seek treatment. There are so many stereotypes and even glorification of mental health in the media.

First of all, it is understandable that movies or TV Shows want to simplify certain processes in order to make them easier for the screen or for people to understand. However, in many cases it borders on outright stigmatization or the other extreme: romanticizing it.

Even simple things like playing ominous music or scary music to depict it, trying to dramatize it to the point where we feel like the character we are watching is no longer the same, that they have “lost” their mind, whereas this is not how depression/anxiety operates.

The glorification of abuse is also very prevalent. There are too many movies where the protagonist is an abusive and awful human being to people around them, yet they are portrayed in a way that creates sympathy for that person (i.e. they are just misunderstood).

It can perpetuate cycles of abuse because we are led to believe that it is not their fault they are abusive or violent, that something will help them change and their heart will change. So we keep waiting for that moment and adding to our trauma.

Using mental health issues as a form of manipulation is also very often portrayed in movies, how many times have we seen someone say:

"if you will leave, I am going to kill myself, but they show it as a sign of endless love as opposed to a form of manipulation."

It leads us to believe that we can use our mental health issues to manipulate people around us and that it is okay to do it. Furthermore, suicidal ideation is often portrayed in a way that is romanticized. For example, for those who have watched the movie “The Last Samurai”

Or the new Netflix show “13 reasons why” suicide is so romanticized there. In "The Last Samurai," it is seen as a way to keep our honour intact or a way to save ourselves whereas in real life, suicide leaves trauma and a deep grief in those left behind.

Even when it comes to therapy, it is not portrayed well. We have people going laying down and speaking while someone is behind them writing on a notepad and asking questions. This is not how it is at all, therapy is a process that is active on both sides.

There are dozens of approaches, many of them include written/oral exercises, drawings, back and forth communication, challenges. They can done sitting, standing, indoors, outdoors. When many people see how therapy is portrayed in the media, they may think it is useless.

Indeed, why go to therapy, pay so much money just to lay down and talk. It minimizes a real science into something that is laughably simplistic and ridiculous, it came to the point where I can’t stand therapy scenes in many movies and tv shows.

Furthermore even when protagonists are going through really hard times, no one in the movie suggests therapy or help, they don’t show those options properly and this isn’t just for old movies and A Shows, it happens with recent ones and surely ones that aren’t even out yet.

While the trend is moving towards better portrayals of mental health issues and many people are trying to do the right thing, it is still incredibly frustrating that multi million dollars productions can’t set aside a little bit to hire mental health professionals who can help.

Lastly, I want to touch on the romanticizing of drugs. So many characters who are addicted are depicted as just being able to kick out their addiction because they found love or someone said the right sentence and suddenly they are free from that addiction.

In real life addiction takes a long time, medications and sometimes inpatient treatment in a centre to help curb it. It is a constant struggle daily to stay sober and a battle that takes a while before it gets easier.

With addiction being portrayed like it is, no wonder people seem to think that people who suffer from addictions are just lazy and need to just quit it because it seems so easy in the way we are told in the media, there are so many ways where the media actively contributes to this stigma.

Thank you to Mark J. Levstein for asking me to write about this story, it is an interesting topic for me to talk about it.

This part only scratches the surface but I hope that it helped you make sense of some of it and to help you be very skeptical whenever mental health scenes are depicted in the media we consume.

I often get asked, "why it is important to process our emotions and our past because it can be such a painful process to dig up, live those memories again and feel that pain and grief."

On the surface, it may seem counterproductive to dig up something asleep in our minds. While it is true that processing emotions can be a painful process and one that is likely to create strong emotions that can be unpleasant, it is also the reason why it is important to dig them up and process them.

For emotions/traumas/losses that we have properly processed, we wouldn’t feel a sharp pain/these strong emotions all over again. We may feel a small amount of it but not the intense powerful ones, the reason why is simply because the processing didn’t happen in the past.

It doesn’t mean it is our fault, we may have not been in a safe space surrounded with supportive individuals or even allowed to show our emotions. Therefore, it was in the best interest of our survival to set these traumas aside until it was safe to solve them.

However, as years pass by and issues pile up that are not processed, we hit a breaking point. For each individual it is going to be very different, that breaking point may seem silly on the surface “a panic attack in the supermarket,” — “not being able to take a shower.” etc.

Therefore, we may focus heavily on the breaking point itself and why it is the one that triggered this avalanche of anxiety/depression. However, a breaking point could have been anything, it was simply the drop that overflowed the bucket.

When the breakdown happens, we may feel strong emotions of anxiety, depression, abandonment and feel as though they are coming out of nowhere but they are the emotions that we have repressed and put a tight lid on because we couldn’t deal with them.

For most of us, these breakdowns will happen in early adulthood but they can also happen at anytime. You may also be wondering how can I know that I haven’t processed something if I can’t remember? The main answer is going to be around triggers.

Triggers are situations that elicit strong emotional responses that can sometimes be too strong for the situation that we are in, let’s say someone says I don’t look good in a yellow t-shirt and I yell at them for commenting on my appearance.

My reaction and anger is not aimed at just that person but every person who engaged in body shaming or talking negatively about my appearance, the trigger simply brought something to the surface that I didn’t deal with properly.

It is important to note that we shouldn’t gaslight ourselves out of emotional responses, it is okay and legitimate to feel our emotions and let people know when they have trespassed our boundaries.

HOW DO WE PROCESS OUR EMOTIONS?

Ideally, it would be with a therapist who would guide the conversation and make sure that we open those past traumas safely and make sure that we are okay at the end of the session. However, not everyone can access a therapist.

The second option is through journaling. Mapping out our past and writing down our specific events and memories, how we felt at that time, etc can do wonders for slowly coming to terms and processing these situations. However, there is a small issue with this option.

A lot of people may engage in intellectual processing meaning we can write down what happenedBor think about them but from a third person perspective and disconnected from them, that’s not processing because we are not fully feeling those emotions.

Processing happens primarily on the emotional side. However, please don’t feel guilty or frustrated if it doesn’t happen at first. We may be too numb at the moment to deal with them and that’s a sign that we may need to take a small step back.

However, if there is a way that you process your emotions that you enjoy, please engage in it as long as it healthy. Some people record themselves talking and sharing the experience out loud, some people journal then burn the page, some people do it through art.

All of these are legit and good ways to solve these unresolved issues from our past when it was either impossible to do so because of a fear of safety or simply that we weren’t developmentally at the point where we even knew how to process these strong emotions.

I hope that this part helped clarify a bit why it is important and what we can do, please take it slowly though because it can get quite overwhelming.

Given how many people have related to the topic about compassion fatigue, I decided to make a whole story about it.

What is it? What we can do to protect ourselves and what we can do to get out of it. First and foremost, compassion fatigue stems from empathy.

Empathy is a wonderful way to understand and relate to people around us. It is one of the best traits a person can have, but it is a double edge sword. When we engage in empathy, we also take in the pain of others, their traumas and difficulties.

A lot of secondary trauma (wrote a journey about it a little while ago) stems from having that empathy in many occasions. In times of crises like now, pain is all around us. There is a lot of suffering and we can’t hide from it given how pervasive it is.

That empathy can quickly become overwhelming because we want to help but so much can happen in one day or even one hour that simply hurts us too much. Compassion fatigue can start happening so quickly, whereas in normal times, it can takes months if not years before it develops.

It is important to realize what our limits are, many people are working way past their limit. When we are exhausted, we are more vulnerable. We don’t have our natural defences ready and we are more susceptible to being hurt by events in our environment.

Therefore, the most important aspect is realizing how much energy we have on a given day. One of the things I do is rate each day within an hour of waking up. For example, today was a 6. I had some energy but was feeling tired, in a day like today and I focused on my engagements.

I didn’t try to do a lot extra because I know I didn’t have the energy for it. In days with lower energy, I would be even more reluctant to engage in certain activities because I need to be functional in the long term.

Short term bouts of going past our energy will mean a longer recovery time and a likelihood of burnout and compassion fatigue. So how do we recognize when we are in a compassion fatigue? The main symptom is going to be numbness.

We feel as though we have no energy left, that helplessness, we feel as though we can no longer relate to people around us. That empathy that was our strength seems to have vanished, we may even feel like bad people or we were just pretending because the empathy now left.

However, we don’t realize the sheer amount of energy that empathy takes and how easy it can go away when we have nothing left in the tank. It is important to realize that and to take a break. It can be a break from work, social media, volunteering, etc...

We need that in order to gather our energy again and regain that empathy even if we feel guilty we can challenge that guilt and continue with taking care of ourselves. When we put others way above ourselves, we no longer have the energy to take care of other people.

That’s why self-care and empathy go hand in hand. Self-care, externalizing and resting are the fuel that keep the empathy going. Without them, it will slowly whither until it is gone. However, that empathy is not gone forever. While it takes time to recover, it is still there.

It is important to take care of yourselves and take time off in order to continue having the energy to fight this crisis and also to value yourselves, being in touch with our level of energy and planning our day accordingly will do wonders in keeping us fighting longer.

I hope that this clarifies the concept of compassion fatigue and helps you understand it better and taking the time off when necessary to gather that energy for empathy.

A SPECIAL THANKS TO:

• Andi Bazaar (Writer)
• Mark J. Levstein (Co-writer)
• Yevhn Gertz (Director Photography)
• Dr Oliver Schofield, MD (Consulting)
• Dr Seth Gryffen, MD (Consulting)
• Timothée Freimann schofield (Photographed)
• Clayton Euridicé Schofield (Editor/Journalist)
• Scott Wynné Schofield (Publisher)
• Henrie Louis Friedrich (Analyst)
• Jwan Höffler Conwall (Art Interior Design)
• Hugo-licharre Freimann (Ass Director)
• Shot at GQ’s Studios by José Schenkkan and Benjamin Schenkkan Joseph
• In appearance by "Clayton-Euridicé Schofield" (Model)
• MHMTID in collaboration with The Me: You Can’t See