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- [00:01]
Host Name
Welcome to five Minute Magic from the Mindful Creative Podcast, a short bonus episode sharing tips and insights from the pages of the book of the same title. Every week, I'll be sharing one or two ideas that can give you an actionable takeaway for your creative process, your work, your business, or just food for thought for the weekend ahead. These episodes share content from the audiobook, and you can find the link to the full version in the show Notes below. Life after spending the last two episodes in the section Define, we find ourselves in the next section of the book, which is titled Help. And the section goes into a practical and valuable advice, how to get unstuck, how to get actual help and assistance with the problems that might be holding us back. So in a previous chapter and section we talked about, you know, things that might be holding us back. Denial, lack of focus, all of that stuff. And in this section, how I'm quite openly talking about the T word, the topic that is mentioned quite a lot on this podcast from various guests and the T word stands for therapy. I'm a big believer in therapy. I'm not heart sending it to anyone, but it has done to me for my career and for my personal development a lot more than, you know, every book on graphic design that I've ever read. So we will look into a bit of a backstory, and that's about my experience of what it felt like growing up in a place that everyone felt normal. Everyone claims to be normal. We still live in a place with the people who should be looking in therapy or getting professional help are happily walking around and the people who are totally fine kind of feel that the people who like go be mad and need therapy. And if not more so, we'll talk about the societal way of our approach to mental health and our minds. Talk about therapy. And I'll tell you a kind of story about how an equine therapy session opened my eyes to my development as a person.
- [01:55]
Guest Name
Chapter 5 Help Growing Up Normal welcome to a world where everyone is doing great and most of all, normal. I grew up in a world just like that. I know this because everyone assured me and themselves that they were nothing out of the ordinary, just regular members of society. No one's actions stood out. No one ever complained or asked for help with anything, let alone their state of mind. But whatever they said and however rose tinted the past can seem, people were seldom genuinely happy and life was rarely simple. The struggle to cope and to maintain a veneer of ordinariness left many craving some kind of vice to make it from one relentlessly normal day to the next. Booze, cigarettes, dope, abusing painkillers and skating white rails being the easiest props. If you admitted you were struggling and sought professional help, you ran the risk of being diagnosed as crazy or mad. There was little of the nuanced understanding that we have around mental health today. It was that cold and that black and white. You either kept your head down and muddled through, or you were ripe for locking up and analysis by clinical psychiatrists with little hope of being let loose in society ever again. It sounds like something from a dystopian thriller set in a terrifying future, but this was the atmosphere of my childhood and adolescence, and it's still a worryingly prevalent attitude across many societies today. How we've changed our minds about our minds. The further back in time we look, the worse the stigmas around mental health seem to us. For centuries, many serious forms of mental issues and diseases were, by today's standards, treated appallingly. With some obvious exceptions, this was due to a lack of understanding rather than evil intent. But ill people would often find themselves not only banished to the fringes of society, but also labelled contagious, like the old laws that made suicide illegal. I don't think it really helped. We know now that you can't catch mental health problems in the same way you catch a cold. Although there are studies looking at whether trauma can be genetically inherited, on top of the foundations laid by our upbringing, our environment clearly plays a part in how we feel and how we experience our surroundings today. The pendulum has, or at least appears to have swung to the other side. We're now far more aware, informed and educated about mental health. It's far higher up our list of priorities. The emergence of mindfulness and our increased awareness of mental health in recent years have played a major part in this. Apps such as Headspace and calm yoga on YouTube, hygge and self care titles, even coloring books for adults have helped to bring the idea of non toxic self care away from the new age Woo woo. And into the mainstream. Normal people are now at least a little more likely to find moments of quiet and solitude and spend some time on themselves. But there is one word that is still strangely taboo. The T word. Yes, that taboo T word is therapy. And we're going to talk about it. When I was a child, conditioned by the normal attitudes of a mid sized Central European city in person, therapy was something that only happened in Hollywood movies for years afterwards. Even long after I moved to the UK in my early twenties, it still seemed exotic and more than a little eccentric. Only more recently have I realised that even those who grew up at the wealthiest epicenters of Western culture saw therapy as the preserve of the rich and famous. So if therapy was a thing, how and where did it happen? Growing up, no one I knew ever talked about therapy. If they had sessions, which I doubt, it would have been easier for them to come out as gay than to admit they were working through difficult emotions. And that's saying something about their feelings. Things are a little different now. But such attitudes weren't confined to the time and place I was raised in. And they still aren't. It will take years, maybe even decades, for mental health therapy and to become an accepted part of everyday life. Yet there's no reason why therapy should have been a taboo in the first place, let alone for the stigma to linger. We go to the gym to help our bodies become healthier and stronger. We take our car to be serviced. We even test plug sockets every so often to make sure they won't electrocute us the next time we charge our phone. But services to help us look after our minds are either unaffordable to the majority or, where available on public health services such as the NHS in the UK have enormous waiting lists, which in itself is very telling. As a result, so many of us self medicate and or find small issues eventually ballooning into huge complexes that are more deeply entrenched and much harder to fix. Now, I stress that I'm no expert on clinical therapy, nor is this book in any way intended as therapy. If you're in a situation that is impacting your life and your health, then I urge you to seek professional help. What I want to do here is to share my experience and my journey through therapy. A journey that has now lasted for more than a decade and been far more unpredictable than I could ever have predicted.