The Balance of Naming but Not Overidentifying

There is no emotional healing without emotional naming. If we avoid, ignore, suppress, or are unaware of our various emotional experiences we will likely experience numerous adverse effects.

A tricky balance, though, is that a hindrance in healing can also be overidentifying with our emotional experiences.

As important as emotional naming can be, it is equally important to allow us to move through that emotion and open up to other emotional experiences. Reasons for overidentifying can be numerous and different from client to client. A common one, especially in this day and age with social media, is that our mental illness becomes our identity.

Our friend groups, our social media engagement, and the root of many of our conversations can sometimes trend toward our mental illness. So, if we start to feel better, we fear what will happen to these roots of our social engagements.

This is why the answer isn’t the complete dismissal of various aspects of our mental health. It can be incredibly healing to surround yourself with others who battle anxiety, depression, or PTSD. The main combatant against shame is social connections and the empathy that comes from them. So, ignoring these aspects of ourselves can be rather damaging.

But, it is important that when you look at the whole picture of your social engagements you have social connections that are rooted in other aspects of yourself. Perhaps people who enjoy a similar hobby as you, have a similar faith as you, or people that you work with. Surrounding yourself with people who don’t necessarily share your same mental battles, can help you open up and experience other emotions.

Your mental illness is a piece of the pie in who you are, but it’s important to recognize there are other pieces to you and to give attention and time to those pieces as well.