The most common question asked every day, in every single language is: “How are you”? The most common response is: “Okay” – or fine/meh/eh/alright. It’s not an answer – it’s a brick wall.
Can you blame ppl for responding in this way? This first slide explains SOME of the reasons why.
On top of those factors, I/we have another hypothesis: we have NO COMMON language that make it easy to explain how we’re doing.
Bc this topic has been binary for so long: “sick vs healthy,” when you raise your hand to say something’s wrong, immediately the convo goes to labels: I’m depressed…I’m anxious. That type of communication is limiting – again you either have “it” or you don’t.
This flies in the face of all other health measures when it comes to our physical health, where we communicate in ranges: weight, temperature, blood sugar, blood pressure, sleep “events” at night when it comes to sleep apnea. Even something as definitive as cancer, technically is based on a range as well – blood cell counts.
When I was at my worst, it felt like I’d moved from one place to the next to the next w my MH. I was “okay,” then “not okay,” & then “awful.” But the good news was, after I found the right treatment modalities, I moved back in the opposite direction – as if my MH was also on a range, or a “scale.” My “awful” phase retreated to just “not okay” once again, until after much work, I was basically back to “okay.”
If you look back in 2018, I tried to put this concept to a visual: 3 places – Thriving, Surviving, Struggling. It wasn’t until I met Dr Andrew Pleener that I then learned of the work of Dr. Stephen Porges, & Polyvagal Theory. Dr Pleener helped me see that what I’d drawn out from my own experience, wasn’t coincidental. It mirrored many of the concepts in Polyvagal Theory – how our nervous system goes through shifts, over time….linearly.
It was from that early work that we created the SameHere Scale: Thriving, Gliding, Surviving, Fluctuation, Struggling, Sinking, that’s used to give common language to schools & offices all over the country (& now globally). Simple/common/universal language is necessary in this space.