This post was motivated by many things coming together, all at once.
We just had MH Awareness Month…w Memorial Day at the tail end of it. We’ve sadly had a run of suicides in the college athlete community, a number of them highlighted on The Today Show. And finally, this month celebrates Pride. So why do all those things matter, together?
If you look at the next slide➡️, one I shared in Stories, @justonesimplehope shared the comfort she found (as the survivor of a son lost to suicide) in seeing all the parents on The Today Show, speaking up TOGETHER abt the suicide of their own children. Her exact words were/are: “I can’t begin to explain the comfort I found in community.” Just from the idea of people standing together.
When we go thru struggles in our lives, bc our society has not been one that encourages open talk, we feel alone & isolated. Even tho it’s counterintuitive, if we go thru something SO common – like the loss of a loved one prematurely, or the divorce of parents, we feel like at that time we are the ONLY ones feeling that pain. And then the cycle starts – we keep it in bc others aren’t sharing. Tho we know others have been thru “it,” we are the only ones going thru it now, & we feel like we don’t have others to talk to.
Yes that’s what this mom wrote, abt why the other parents speaking up on The Today Show was so powerful – seeing others go thru the same struggle combats the isolation & brings on healing. But why bring up MH Awareness, Memorial Day, Pride, on top of this? For the same reason I put “same” in quotes on this post graphic.
The only thing limiting us in finding strength in community when we feel alone & isolated, is the limiting ways our human brains define what is the “SAME.” Underlying most all struggle is trauma. Trauma, while it comes from many diff places – impacts these nervous systems we have in SIMILAR ways.
Many of us grew up in an era where: “vets can only talk to vets” bc they know what it’s like to have been thru war. If that’s how we define “same” – we are limited in who we can find comfort from. The child who has been in the closest struggling w (Cont➡️3)