May is Mental Health Awareness Month

Content warning: Miscarriage, Pregnancy Loss, Infertility, Grief, Loss, Trauma, Anxiety, Depression, Traumatic Birth, Postpartum Depression & Anxiety (PPDA), PTSD, Complex PTSD, Burnout

May is Mental Health Awareness month. May is also a very difficult month for me. These two things will always be linked.

For as long as I can remember, I have had what is now considered high-functioning anxiety. (I know that this is not a classification in the DSM-5 and I also know that what I experience is real so 🤷🏼‍♀️). If you knew me during my college and DOE years, you knew me as a perfectionist who had a bitch of a time relinquishing any control whatsoever. I overworked myself to avoid feeling anything. Deep down, I knew I was trying to outrun the depression I knew was coming eventually, but I wasn't ready to face it yet.

I completely took my mental health for granted until 2013 when I had a miscarriage. While everything that came with that was heartbreaking, it was also my body's way of getting me to slow down because I hadn't been listening. I was running myself into the ground and was too stubborn to see it. But I finally had to stop and face it.

This began my deep (so, so deep if you know me 🤣) dive into personal development. I had started working with life coaches about a year before this and I finally found a therapist and started going to therapy. (My friends Gretchen and Lauren have always normalized therapy and mental health for me, but never pushed me, and I finally knew when I was ready 💜). The topic of Post Traumatic Growth is controversial but again explains my experience. 🤷🏼‍♀️ This is why both coaching and therapy hold a very special place in my heart!

There are so many ups and downs all the time doing this work. I often feel like I'm more confused than ever, but I've also made huge shifts in my life just by starting to pay attention to my mental health.

I have been diagnosed with postpartum anxiety & depression PPAD (which I realized I had been dealing with my entire life) and medically I have been diagnosed with PCOS which is linked to anxiety and depression. I have struggled multiple times with burnout, which is also closely tied to depression, so it's been a process of figuring out which it is at any given time so I can treat it. I have also been diagnosed with PTSD (most likely Complex-PTSD the more I learn about it& also not in the DSM-5). I have been through 3 therapists (who were exactly what I needed at the time) and multiple modalities. EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique)/Tapping and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) have been the most helpful for me since they're all about moving energy and trauma through your body. Panic attacks are scary. My current therapist is so trauma-informed and I finally had a language to understand how I've been feeling for so long. Therapy and working on my mental health are definitely the long games but have helped me change my life for the better.

All of these experiences, both good and bad, led me to become a Coach. There are so many overlaps between therapy and coaching but for me they work together seamlessly. It’s often during a coaching session or when I’m self-coaching that something comes up that needs to be processed more, or re-processed. I’m able to keep myself safe (a BIG fear that comes from experiencing trauma) and bring it to my therapist to work through instead of trying to work through it on my own.

Mental health awareness has changed my life for the better. I’ve realized that my mental health is one of the biggest parts of my overall health. Paying attention to it also helps me take action when it comes to my physical health. I’ve become very vocal about mental health in the past couple years because I know how important it is to hear people talk about it. To not feel so alone. To not think you’re the only one experiencing something. We’re way more alike than we are different and even if someone hasn’t gone through the same experience, chances are we have felt a similar way. It can feel so hard when your reality is difficult and it feels like your mind is attacking you. It's hard not to isolate when you're struggling but reaching out is just the beginning of getting support. I am always here to start the conversation as a person (not just in a coaching capacity).