Mental Health - Self Talk

Understanding the Problems in life

Introduction
Assuming that you've determined that self-help is an appropriate approach for addressing your problems, your next step is to develop an accurate understand of your problem. You have to understand what is happening to cause you pain or difficulty, and why it is happening before you can hope to improve your situation.
Your life is a complicated thing with many aspects to it. It is convenient to divide your life up into parts, which we can call "life-domains" so as to be able to talk about one part of your life at a time. We need to be able to do this because while some problems affect many aspects of your life (many "life-domains") at once, other problems are fairly domain specific. In such cases, we want to be able to identify just the parts of your life that are affected by your problem, so that we can give them special attention. Also, because different aspects of your life are often addressed best with different methods, it is helpful to be able to describe how even complex problems affect the different aspects of your life, so that you can address each aspect in turn. Breaking problems down in this manner helps you to solve them more easily.

Identify What Life Domains Are Affected
A good first step towards figuring out what is wrong (if it isn't already obvious to you) is to identify which parts of your life are most affected by your problem. Mental health professionals have developed various classification schemes useful for describing the important aspects of people's lives. A reasonably comprehensive summary list of life's various aspects or domains is presented below. In order to better help you appreciate the importance and scope of each domain presented in this list, we have included a list of questions to ask yourself regarding each one. If you can answer these questions for a given domain without having problems come to your mind, you probably don't have any serious problems with regard to that life domain.
§ Physical and Mental Health. Your physical and mental health are the foundation upon which the rest of your life sits. Problems with physical or mental health are basic and tend to affect you on many levels. You have the potential to positively influence your health by making time to take good care of yourself (exercising regularly, eating healthy food and getting enough sleep), and by following doctor's instructions when you are prescribed a treatment regime. Physical and mental problems can be obvious or subtle. Consider the following questions to give yourself a sense as to whether your problem has to do with your physical or mental health:

Are you physically healthy?
Do you feel well? Do you feel energetic?
Do you exercise regularly?
Do you regularly eat a nutritionally sound diet?
Do you get enough sleep?
Are you over-using or abusing alcohol, drugs of any kind or any foods?
Do you binge on food or purge foods (by use of self-directed vomiting or laxatives)?
Spirituality and Values.Though you may be physically healthy, you're unlikely to feel settled and comfortable if you don't have a set of values and/or spiritual beliefs that help anchor you and guide your actions and decisions. Even when people have a good set of values, they don't always follow those values. Conflicts between what you know you should do and what you end up doing can sometimes cause problems too. Consider the following questions to determine if your issue has to do with your spiritual beliefs or your values
Do you have a strong sense of your values (e.g., what is right and what is wrong)?
Are you able to live your values by putting them into action in your daily life (if not, does that bother you?)
Do you take part in any spiritual practices? If not, would you like to?
Do you have spiritual beliefs? If so, are these beliefs helping or hindering you in living a satisfactory life?
If you don’t have what you consider spiritual beliefs, would you like to develop some? Do you think this would be helpful to you?
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Social Problems
§ Family and Friendships.
People are social creatures who usually need the comfort and support of healthy relationships with other people before they can feel truly good about themselves. Forming and maintaining healthy relationships is easy for some people to accomplish, but other people find it a perilously difficult task. Some people have specific difficulties forming particular kinds of relationships. They may have good friendships, but be uncomfortable in a dating or romantic setting. They may have had a difficult family life while growing up, but have been able to marry well. Other people have a difficult social time all around, with a difficult family life, few friends and no prospects for satisfying adult relationships. Consider the following questions to determine if your issues have something to do with your social life:
§ Are you lonely?
§ Are you shy?
§ Do you get along with family members or are family gatherings sources of stress and pain?
§ Are there specific family members or friends who are difficult to be with?
§ Would you like to resolve any issues with family members or friends?
§ How close are you with your family and friends? Would you like to be closer?
§ Would you like to be less dependent on family because being with them isn’t good for you?
§ Do you have at least one or two close friends (not your family) who are supportive of you?
§ Is it hard for you to meet people (friends, romantic partners, etc.)
§ Do you have a lover or romantic partner?
§ Are you feeling you would like some or more romance, intimacy and/or sexual involvement in your life?
Jobs, Careers and Meaningful Activities.
In addition to having a healthy social life, most people feel the need to engage themselves in productive and meaningful work. Sometimes this work is performed in exchange for money (as when someone writes a book, cooks a meal, cuts grass or performs other labor or services to benefit someone), sometimes it is performed for love (as when a mother or father spends time parenting their children), and sometimes it is performed simply as a means of doing something useful to benefit their community (such as when a retiree volunteers at the library). Though work may be performed for money, there are often other important payoffs that people engaged in such work get in addition to money (such as a teacher's satisfaction at seeing a child learn). Some people are lucky to find work and meaningful activities that fit their personality and interests, while others end up feeling trapped in careers that don't seem to suit them. Still others would like to work, but can't find any that lasts. Most everyone has to deal with intense work pressure to perform. Consider the following questions to help you determine whether your work or committed activity life is part of your problem:
Are you happy and satisfied with your work or career? If not, what is wrong with what you do?
Is there anything you would like to change about your job, career direction, or other activity? Would you like to explore other options?
Whether or not you work, do you pursue any other meaningful activities that help you feel like you're doing something useful or fun (such as involvement in: a senior center, school, volunteer work, a club, an active hobby, a sport)? Would becoming so involved help you feel better, do you think?
Is your work too demanding? Are you able to manage the resulting stress?
Lifestyle Indicators
§ Education
Many modern jobs and careers require that workers be educated before they are qualified to be hired. Most Western nations provide public education up to high school level, but the quality of that education varies considerably. Some students end up doing well in school, while others are not supported well and fall through the cracks. Later in life, they may not be eligible for particular positions because they did not complete schooling. Some students would like to go on for specialized study (e.g., college, graduate school, certifications) but cannot afford to do so. Some students get themselves into one career and then realize they might be better off working in a different one, requiring different education. Returning to school as an adult with adult responsibilities is often seen as a daunting task. Consider the following questions to determine whether your educational attainments (or lack thereof) are part of your problem.
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§ Are there topics you would like to learn more about?
§ Are you satisfied with your educational attainment (what you've learned, the degree you've obtained)?
§ Would it help your career if you were more educated?
§ Do you enjoy taking courses or reading to learn? Would you liked to be part of something through which you could learn (workbooks, workshops, groups, and clubs, such as a book club or society)?
§ Money
The amount of money you are able to earn determines how well you will live; whether you will be hungry or not, whether you have permanent shelter or a home or not, and how well you can dress. A certain minimum of money is necessary just to survive. Beyond survival, many people make their money into the defining measurement of their lives and judge how successful they are in relationship to how much they can spend. Many people go deeply into debt on credit cards in order to finance a status-conscious lifestyle that is beyond their means. They may spend money on short term luxuries such as a fancy car and not on longer term necessities such as health insurance, and savings for retirement. Consider the following questions to help yourself determine whether your relationship to money is part of the problem.
§ Do you worry about money?
§ Do you have enough income to meet your expenses?
§ Do you have health insurance?
§ Do you save enough money so that you'll have some set aside in the event of an emergency or for retirement?
Are you satisfied with how you live (e.g., your housing, diet, transportation, entertainment, etc.)? Self Identity Problems
§ Identity
People's identity is rooted in their identifications; in what they associated themselves with. What a person associates him or herself with is ultimately who that person is, for all identity is ultimately in relationship to something else. An American person identifies himself or herself as "American", for example, and that becomes part of that American person's identity. The same person might identify themselves as male (or female), a member of a particular religious group, a brother or sister, a child, an employee, etc. Even more personally, they may identify themselves as a loser, as someone who is helpless to influence the course of their lives, or as someone who needs to hate a particular religious group simply because that is what members of their own religious group are "supposed" to do. Though such personal beliefs may have no basis in reality, they often are taken at face value by the people who hold them. Such people act on their mistaken or irrational beliefs and end up creating problems for themselves.
Identity is not just what you know; it is also how you know. People are not born with an identity. Rather, identity is something that evolves over time. Young children have simple identities and see things in an overly simple, generally self-serving manner. As people grow older and wiser, they identify themselves with other people, places and things in increasingly sophisticated ways and start to grow out of this initial selfishness. A young child may see her mother as a creature that exists solely to take care of her, but an older child will often start to appreciate that her mother has needs of her own, and start acting less selfishly towards her mother so as to take that knowledge into account. Sometimes life events interrupt this natural progression from selfishness to thoughtfulness and people's identities stop growing. Such people may be chronologically adults, but relate to others in the selfish manner characteristic of a younger child, creating problems for themselves and the people around them when their selfish expectations clash with those held by people around them, who expect a more adult, more "responsive" and "responsible" identity to be present.

§ Whether due to mistaken beliefs or developmental delays, identity problems can cause people to have difficulty taking an appropriate perspective towards other important life tasks, creating a wide range of life problems. The following list describes a few different ways that identity problems can be present. Consider each to determine whether an identity problem helps contribute to your own problem.
§ Low Self-Esteem.
A poor sense of self-worth (also known as poor self-esteem) occurs when you come to believe that you have little value or worth. This often occurs when key people in your life are critical towards you, or when you are perfectionist, and critical towards yourself. In either case, the tendency is to harshly judge, and ignore or play down the importance of real accomplishments, even when it makes no sense to act this way. There may also be a belief present to the effect that self-worth can only be based on the acclaim of other "popular" high status people, even thought this is not the case.
§ Do you like yourself?
§ Are you good at anything useful?
§ Low Self-Efficacy.
Self-efficacy describes how effective and in control of their lives people believe they can be. People need to feel that they have a certain amount of control over their lives so as to be able to get out of difficult situations or meet challenges they are expected to meet. When people believe they are helpless to alter negative situations they find themselves in (a situation called "learned helplessness"), they tend to get depressed. Though there are certainly many aspects of life that people cannot controlled, there are a remarkable number of things that can be influenced. People who have low self-efficacy expectations of themselves will believe they are helpless to influence their fate, however, and will generally not seek to alter their lives, even when they are suffering. Self-efficacy tends to be domain-specific; You might feel confident in one area of your life but feel helpless to influence another.
§ Do you believe you have control over the important aspects of your life?
§ Are you "stuck" in a situation you don't like but can't leave? Why do you think that is the case?
§ Are you a weak person? In what way? Why is that?
Levels of Emotion
§ Inadequate Concern For Others.
For a variety of reasons, some people fail to develop emotionally beyond the early childhood stage where caregivers exist to take care of and to frustrate the needs of little children. Adults whose identities fail to develop in this manner tend to regard the other adults around them as primarily there to either care for or frustrate their needs. It tends not to occur to such folk that those other adults may have perfectly legitimate needs or desires themselves that they ought to be accommodating. When this thought does cross their minds, they tend not to put too much stock in it. Adults who demonstrate inadequate concern and empathic appreciation for others tend to have troubled, conflict-filled relationships with others. They may fail to appreciate that it is their own empathic failings that are causing a large number of such problems, and think instead that other people's failings are to blame (e.g, "So I fooled around a little on the side, so what! Why is (my wife) so upset with me? It's not like I love those other women").
§ Are you a giving, generous person?
§ Is other people's welfare important to you?
§ Do other people say you are selfish?
§ Are you aware of having a conscience? Are you troubled by it?
Overly High Concern For Others.
If some people demonstrate an inadequate concern for others' feelings and needs, other people react so strongly to those feelings and needs that they end up harming themselves in the process. The problem typically has to do with how a person is in the habit of judging themselves. Healthy people are attentive to the needs and desires of others, but retain their own center of judgment If a healthy woman is out on a date, for instance, the questions that fill her mind (to the extent there are questions at all) have to do with whether she is enjoying herself. Some people, however, get hung up on what other people are thinking and spend all their time worried about being negatively evaluated by those other people. While out on a date, such a person would spend his time worried whether his partner liked him or not. It wouldn't even occur to him that his own sense of the date was important. People who demonstrate an over-regard for the opinions of others tend to set themselves up to be anxious and worried. Over-concern for others is related to self-esteem, as your self-esteem tends to be low when you are always worried about being judged by someone else. However, it is an independent dimension of identity, nevertheless.
Does your concern for what other people think get in the way of your life?
Do you worry about rejection? About being evaluated in a negative way?
Poor Emotional Coping Skills.
Some people's problems are not so much that they pay too much attention to what other people think, but that they don't know how to manage the intense feelings they experience when they are rejected. These people tend to become overwhelmed by their feelings and end up "acting out" various emotion-motivated extreme behaviors that may result in harm (to themselves or to others), or feelings of embarrassment, shame, humiliation or regret. They may feel betrayed by friends, lovers or family members and become intensely angry with them. They may start fights or slash tires. They may take drugs or consume large quantities of alcohol. They may act out sexually. They may become abusive They may threaten suicide, or cut or burn themselves. Such people typically don't know how to calm themselves very effectively, and might not choose to do so in the heat of the moment if they did.
Do you have a temper? Do you upset easily?
Are you ever ashamed of how you react when upset?
Have you ever hurt yourself or someone else when upset?